Good point. I think both AI companies and hardware makers should pay for the damage they caused to us here.
They act as a de-facto monopoly and milk us. Why is this allowed?
They act as a de-facto monopoly and milk us. Why is this allowed?
Nobody is "allowing" this. It's a natural property of being both advanced technology and a commodity at the same time.
Recently they had a second price fixing lawsuit thrown out (in the US).
Now with the state of things I'm sure another lawsuit will arrive and be thrown out because the government will do anything to keep the AI bubble rolling and a price fixing suit will be a threat to national security, somehow. Obviously thats speculative and opinion but to be clear, people are allowing it. There are and more so were things that could be done.
It started with raegan, and even parties on the “left” in the west believe in it with very few exceptions.
The thing that enables this is pretty obvious. The population is divided into two camps, the first of which holds the heuristic that regulations are "communism and totalitarianism" and this camp is used to prevent e.g. antitrust rules/enforcement. The second camp holds the heuristic that companies need to be aggressively "regulated" and this camp is used to create/sustain rules making it harder to enter the market.
The problem is that ordinary people don't have the resources to dive into the details of any given proposal but the companies do. So what we need is a simple heuristic for ordinary people to distinguish them: Make the majority of "regulations" apply only to companies with more than 20% market share. No one is allowed to dump industrial waste in the river but only dominant companies have bureaucratic reporting requirements etc. Allow private lawsuits against dominant companies for certain offenses but only government-initiated prosecutions against smaller ones, the latter preventing incumbents from miring new challengers in litigation and requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
This even makes logical sense, because most of the rules are attempts to mitigate an uncompetitive market, so applying them to new entrants or markets with >5 competitors is more likely to be deleterious, i.e. drive further consolidation. Whereas if the market is already consolidated then the thicket of rules constrains the incumbents from abusing their dominance in the uncompetitive market while encouraging new entrants who are below the threshold.
How is this more efficient? You'd still be applying all of the inefficient regulatory rules intended to mitigate a lack of competition to the smaller companies trying to sustain a competitive market, and those rules are much more deleterious for smaller entities than higher tax rates.
If you have $100M in fixed regulatory overhead for a larger company with $10B in profit, it's only equivalent to a 1% tax. The same $100M for a smaller company with $50M in profit is a 200% tax. There is no tax rate you can impose on the larger company to make up for it because the overhead destroys the smaller company regardless of what you do to the larger one.
As a counterpoint: Look at very high value goods, like jet engines and MRI machines. I went for an MRI the other day and wondered to myself (then asked an LLM) what the international MRI market looks like. They are vanishingly small number of manufacturers and are usually dominated by a few international players. How are you going to apply this tax to non-domiciled (international) companies? Also, companies like General Electric, Mitsubishi Heavy, and Seimens are enormous and incredibly diverse. This idea falls apart quickly.
it was clinton who delivered the democrats to wall street and vice versa
Maybe it’s time for a refresher on what neoliberal means? It’s not simply “new liberalism”. Reaganomics was the start of neoliberalism in the US, tho of course it shifted and developed its character further over time into the monster that drives 99% of our problems today