At this point, tech's major competitors are overseas. Never thought I'd be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America
That sounds smart, but is it actually true? How many of the things enabling the existence of this website are inventions made in the research institute of the Bell Telecom company.
On top of my head, there are transistors, C, Unix and a fair bit of cryptographical work. I'm sure others can add a lot more to the list.
Hell, this website recently carried an article that mentioned that the very financial concepts that enable companies like Y-combinator to exist were invented by a researcher at Bell labs.[1]
In both giving them the bankroll to research it pre-breakup, and the economic freedom to pursue it under separate ventures post-forced breakup - it was most likely equally valuable.
A lot of things that make our modern apparatus' possible came from both Bell Labs research, and Bell Labs branching out by force.
For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.
WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
The bottom 90% is owning an ever smaller share of the economy, while the real economy doesn't seem to grow that much.
It seems like you are comparing small companies vs large companies, rather than US vs Chinese.
Big companies tend to calcify. We can see that in FAMANG's products. Big companies can also remove any direct competition in multiple ways that smaller companies can't:
1. Bankrupt them through frivolous litigation.
2. Buy them.
3. Lower their prices so new competitors who don't have economies of scale can't be price competitive.
4. Propose legislative regulation that they can afford but smaller competitors can't.
5. Pay for negative news articles to be written against their competition (FUD).
6. Poach their talent.
But doesn't that make room for someone else to come in and be abusive? Yes and we have the tools to prevent that, if necessary.