We must break tech monopolies before they break us | Hacker News Reader

We must break tech monopolies before they break us

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63 pointsunripe_syntax23 comments

The cry to "break up the monopolies" bugs me. Maybe because I am old enough to remember the failed Microsoft case or to have lived the re-unification of AT&T into, well, AT&T.

If you really do believe that the tech giants need to be reigned in, breaking them up is NOT the way to do it. It's a red herring, a quixotical quest that will eat up time, money and opportunity costs for newer, better companies. Break-ups will be litigated endlessly, we'll end up talking about who benefits from what and at the end either nothing will happen or some business unit(s) will be spun out as sacrificial lambs so that the main behemoths can keep printing cash.

The correct answer IMHO is "tax and regulate". Recognize that big tech are now infrastructure companies, massive railways on which international commerce happens and that they need to be taxed as such and regulated. As in regulated for minimum service levels, for liability on what happens on their rails (see Crowdstrike), for access to their platforms to others, for competing against their own customers. Regulate them, tax them, squeeze their margins down to something reasonable, turn them into, well, AT&T.

No, that won't kill them and it would be much less dramatic than a breakup (and would feel less satisfactory, for sure). But it could actually happen relatively quickly and would push them to their natural place, i.e. platforms and utilities on top of which younger, hungrier companies can build.

In my opinion, the most important "infrastructure" tech companies are credit card companies and banks. It's kind of wild that all digital money-handling is done by a third party that isn't regulated like a utility.

This will eventually be resolved, forward looking, as payment volume ramps on the Federal Reserve’s FedNow instant payment system [1] [2] [3]. Banks in the US are already regulated as a utility, for the most part.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 (“HN: FedNow is live)

[2] https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/fednow-rtp-bank-participat... (“FedNow zooms past RTP participation in inaugural year”)

[3] https://news.cision.com/fxc-intelligence/r/fednow--the-numbe... (“FedNow: the numbers one-year on”)

Regulation is what they want. It first grants them moat and then they capture said regulation.

If you actually want to solve the problems of monopolies and have a working free market you should. And in most countries monopolies are not allowed or frowned upon, regulation is already often in place

Look at the cat and mouse game the EU and apple are playing in regulation.

Where actually they are a full monopoly in the App Store market. Only way to solve it, is to break it up.

> Where actually they are a full monopoly in the App Store market.

They do, they absolutely do. What’s worse, it turns out they have a full monopoly in MacBooks, computers running macOS, iPads, and iPhones.

In other words, no they don’t. The legal definition of monopoly is not solely, “if there’s only one participant in a market, the participant in that market has a monopoly”. There is necessarily more to it than that, because if that’s all it was, literally every company selling a product would have a monopoly in that product.

Network effects like Big Tech employs ensures that inferior products will still be dominant in the market. Network effects strangle markets.

You could argue that markets are just the wrong kind of social formation for mediating software production and distribution, since software is not a commodity.

Talking about the Baby Bells reforming is a bit misleading because not all of the Baby Bells reformed into AT&T and breaking them into other companies allowed other TelCos to grow so by the time these mergers happened there were other competitors in this space which is the entire point of breaking up these companies.

The regulation that allowed for the breakup to happen in the first place was then not enforced for the years that followed, allowing for more monopolies in a variety of fields to form.

Also the baby bells had a physical monopoly on the last mile, which they still basically have because expensive to run multiple providers into a house for vs the monthly fees available. Wholesale got way more competitive though. Breaking up tech would not be the same because their monopoly isn't physical and would be much weaker if the parts had to operate independently.

AT&T was a breakup within a utility. Huge problem to have entrenched advantage and regulatory capture of phone lines. AT&T doesn't make money off of POTS or long distance land lines anymore. It's cable and mobile, so the the new company is nothing like the old one.

I agree it is depressing the degree to which our government is incapable of breaking up monopolies and restricting/penalizing anticompetitive behavior. It's just another aspect of near total political control by corporations in America.

But the laws are on the books, they are just going unenforced by DOJ, and the shadow money system that buys judicial favor in virtually all corporate cases.

Agree on the sentiment, though there's quite a lot of hostnames being called on that page, including Google Tag Manager, etc etc.

Giving these large tech companies all the data they could ever need is part of the problem for sure. There are plenty alternatives that can be used which at least is a meaningful course of action to promote diversity away from big tech.

I feel like the biggest, most effective step we should take is to stop these companies from being able to buy political power. “Breaking” them while those in charge of breaking are owned by the same companies that is being broken up is not a real solution. It is purely optics. If political power was not for sale to the highest bidder, we could actually tackle monopolies by fairly regulating them. Until that happens, anything we try to do to handle said monopolies is a little pointless because they have direct control over the regulators.

Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand how this is not the most obvious first step towards any meaningful change. So maybe someone can point out what I’m missing here.

AI could revolutionize app development, shifting power to individual developers and consultants. With AI coding assistants, they might build custom apps for businesses in days instead of months. These AI-powered apps could even maintain and upgrade themselves, matching or surpassing traditional software support.

This shift could level the playing field. Small businesses could access tailored software solutions without huge teams or long wait times. It's democratizing app development, potentially breaking the dominance of tech giants and creating a more balanced, competitive digital landscape.

You wildly overestimate the capabilities of AI, while underestimating their cost.

I've built solutions with it, so I'm not "wildly" overestimating the capabilities or cost. If LLMs keep increasing in capability, then what I'm talking about becomes a possibility, not a certainty.

If we assume that this is true, then big tech gets those benefits too, so each of their developers is more productive too

Hard agree with this sentiment. Large companies can wield levels of power that distort the economy, legal systems, innovation, immigration, fair competition, standards, etc.

Amazon entering a market absolutely warps that market.

> Amazon entering a market absolutely warps that market.

Yep. I remember them announcing something about groceries or whatever a long time ago and it causing a fall in the share price of various other companies. I think this pattern has happened several times with giant tech monopolists.

I get the feeling that we are told to look at AI for danger (there prolly is, but as of yet it not that evident to me; at this point I'd say AI is simply better and more blackboxy algorithms).

But the danger with big tech to me is much more similar to how big-MSM is dangerous.

There's a lot of proof now that big-tech + MSM have been behaving against the interests of "the people" in the C19 response and the 2020 elections.

Zukerberg was telling his C-fam to not take the vax while his platform was pushing the vax (not allowing critique of the vax) in all kinds of nasty ways.

Similar things have come out regarding the 2020 elections. Where "Russian meddling" turned out to be "DNC meddling".

I didn't hear about the Zuckerberg part, do you have a link to the article? I can't find it

Here including the whole "debunking" of it... Judge for yourself if this type of info would be removed from FB if it was posted by users:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/06/zuckerberg-vaccines-v...

General market monopolies exist and always have existed due to government giving warrant to particular groups. Econ 101

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