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Comment by christhecaribou | Hacker News Reader

All of the Big Tech companies should be split up. Every single one.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

It frustrates me that we keep wasting time debating what is a monopoly or letting dead end lawsuits play out in the courts over years. The big tech companies will easily avoid consequences under the current framework. We need a totally new set of laws to deal with big corporations.

Not only should they be split up, but we need retroactive fines for all of the anti-competitive things they have done. Additionally, I think we need different taxes based on the size of the company and we also need regulations to ban certain practices like rent seeking in app stores or bundling in the case of Microsoft or loss leading when you are a large company. Any business built on network effects should be forced to be interoperable once it is big enough.

Finally, we need to recognize that some businesses that are very large are basically as influential as government agencies and as critical as a utility service. These companies should not be operating like a random private entity but should be regulated. As an example, the largest social media companies should be treated like common carriers or utilities.

And then what? Ma Bell was split up, and longn distance calls still cost $3 a minute for decades. Then Voice over IP took the cost down to near-zero practically overnight.

The key is in an open and permissionless technological alternative.

Most of big tech doesn't have much of a monopoly on the technology. They have a monopoly on network lock-in. If you split them up, they have no monopoly and competition can resume.

Phone companies were for years considered the dictionary example of a “natural monopoly” because of the network effect. I’m actually old enough to remember when you could call people in AT&T and Verizon network respectively, cheaply, or use phone cards LOL. But call outside the network? You pay.

Yes, I agree the government did ONE thing that helped some people and that is pass a law mandating that you could port your phone number between carriers.

But no, splitting up Ma Bell into a cartel of phone companies did little to lower the price of phone calls. Technology like Voice Over IP did that overnight.

The Web disrupted walled gardens like AOL overnight. Trillions of dollars in value was unlocked with business models like SaaS and e-commerce. Splitting AOL into 5 AOLs wouldn’t do that.

The reason Google, Facebook, Amazon and all thr Big Tech companies even were able to get their start (and funding) is because they built on top of the open and permissionless Web!

Do you really think AOL or MSN would have allowed a search engine, a social network and a massive global store to grow within their walled garden and not pay then any rent? And they wouldn’t cannibalize them like Twitter did with Periscope and so many other platforms did with their startups? Come on :)

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