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Comment by zoobab | Hacker News Reader

Antitrust barely works, when it's not a monopoly it's an oligopoly.

And remedies are often pocket money.

For Microsoft Windows, antitrust authorities and courts did not do anything.

We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Guess we should just let companies go hogwild and create a cyberpunk dystopia.

Or worse, destabilize society to the point of catastrophic collapse like the Accelerationists depicted in Mountainhead, though that film was pulling punches.

It partially used to work, but a lot of the legal underpinnings were dismantled in the late 90's, and parts of it possibly also in the reagan era. Right now, MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's.

> MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's

The situation feels a little bit different, given that they in this case the ones going up against a deeply-entrenched web monopoly, with a fork of that monopoly's own codebase...

This is very much not true. Microsoft was forced into publishing a lot of documentation through anti-trust, which is why e.g. Office document formats or SMB protocol are published (and used for interop by projects such as Samba).

The problem was not enough anti-trust, not that it doesn't work.

I feel like we bolt anti-trust after a market has developed. For instance, we go after big tech once it has entrenched itself. Whatabout taking pro-active action. For instance, in the ML market we should be sponsoring a gajillion companies to take on chip design so that we don't end up with a future where NVidia is the sole provider of AI chips. We should foster open standards and penalize companies for not adopting/hijacking them where possible. Similarly we need to make sure the zoo of ML model providers survives rather than consolidateing to a few. I think there may be ways to do this without being adverserial about it.

NIST is supposed to serve this purpose but is very underfunded

Anti trust forced a different behavior on the MSFT borg of that era. Threats with teeth force firms to treat them seriously.

We slap these people on the wrist and you declare nothing we do works. No wonder.

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