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Comment by deaux | Hacker News Reader

Ah, so exactly like Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and so on have done to the rest of the world over the last few decades then?

Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.

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Except domestic alternatives to the tech companies you listed were not driven out by them, they still exist today with substantial market share. American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, and when competition does exist they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments. So your counter narrative is false here.

> American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition,

Do you believe the lack of competition is purely because the products are superior?

US tech is now sort of like the dollar. People/countries outside the US need and want alternatives to hedge against in the event of political uncertainity but cannot do it completely for various reasons including arm twisting by the US govt.

One example is some govts and universities in the EU are trying to get rid of MS products for decades but they are unable to.

> American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition

If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China?

> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments

So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?

>> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments

I think you misunderstood this. When domestic competitor arise against American tech, the domestic government tends to explicitly favour those competitor against American tech, placing the latter at an disadvantage.

You can see India or China or Korea or SEA where they have their own favored food delivery apps and internet services. Even in the EU the local LLM companies like Mistral are favored by local businesses for integration over OpenAI. Clearly American tech hasn't actually displaced serious domestic competitors, so the rare earths comparison fails when the USA in contrast is far more willing to let local businesses fail.

Not American and I also agree that the current big techs should be broken up by force of the state, there is a very big difference between a company becoming monopolistic due to market forces, and a company becoming monopolistic due to state strategy, intervention, backing.

Things can be bad in a spectrum and I believe it is much easier for society/state to break up a capitalistic monopoly than a state backed monopoly. To illustrate, the state has sued some of those companies and they were seriously threatened, because of competition ills. That is not the case with a state company.

And what exactly are grants then? Tariffs? All the lobbied laws that benefit specific corporations or industries? Aren't they state backed advantages?

Banks created their oligopolies and then who saved them when they fucked up?

Isn't Tesla a state backed monopoly in the USA because of grants and tariffs on external competitors? Isn't SpaceX? Yet nobody treats then as state backed.

I don't understand this necessity to put companies in a pedestal and hate on states. Capitalist propaganda I guess?

Market forces are manipulated all the time. This distinction is nonsense. Companies influence states and vice-versa.

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