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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.

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It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".

Anti-monopoly failing is the effect, not the cause - how is there a monopoly to start with?

You may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work.

Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public.

Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.

I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing

And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.

If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.

The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.

The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.

I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.

I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.

Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)

> if you start with a $3000 loss per month

This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors.

I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite apply to Fairphone. Fairphone aren't trying to cheat you, there's no information asymmetry here; they're just providing a feature ("fairness") which you can't easily get elsewhere and that turns out to be really expensive.

At the other end of the "market entry" problem: this is why RAM is so expensive right now, you can't just spin up a new DRAM line in your garage even if you're Sam Zeeloof.

Why would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?

Jorma Jaakko Ollila didn't seem to have that problem.

(Explaining the joke: Finnish CEO of Nokia, responsible for the Symbian operating system)

There was nothing like it on phones though.

I don't think you can just say the market would decide when it is so easy to hide corner cutting and sell the thing cheaper.

FYI you don't seem to be aware that you are shadowbanned.

there is no such thing here

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