Erm. Should we tell her that Google came before Bing?

I know this proposal is just for tech companies, but it seems like it will create as many problems as it solves.

This I think is one of the understated values of primaries and presidential elections. Even if Warren is elected and unable to get legislation passed, she has moved this particular conversation forward.

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

The only way to stop monopolies from forming is by getting rid of legislation that heavily benefits large businesses.

True. On the other hand, big tech companies are the only agencies that are taking on big problems, social and technical. Break up big tech and many things won't get done. No ubiquitous high speed networks, no practical general purpose artificial intelligence, no indexed access to the world's knowledge, no voice interface minions, and so forth. Government seems unable and unwilling to do the sort of things Big Tech does.

Breaking up big tech seems to be the wrong approach and is likely to be more difficult and more destructive than it would appear at first glance. Better to enlist big tech to cooperate and make the world a better place.

"Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business."

The possibility of being "snapped up" is very good money for venture capitalists instead of waiting a decade for an IPO. So regulating acquisitions by the big players may have a chilling effect on capital and, thereby, tech innovation.

In addition, the first mover effect is very powerful and should not be discounted. For example, the competition between Snapchat and Facebook was not as skewed as the outcome would have you believe. Snapchat had and has a large userbase, and is losing because of mistakes (including not agreeing to very good acquisition offers). I can't personally think of too many other examples of megatitans successfully squashing innovative smaller companies with an equivalent product.

> He (Szabo) added that he also felt Ms. Warren is “wrong in her assertion that tech markets lack competition.”

That’s got to be one of those jokes that go viral. Most of the consumer facing services are heavily concentrated among less than a handful (considering specific areas, and not in general).

It’s time at least some of what she calls for gets done!

There are urgent issues with Google and monopoly, search, chrome, amp, android and youtube and once you combine that with Facebook a toxic predatory surveillance capitalism model based on harvesting and collating private data to build dossiers that is ominous for any free society.

But for the tech community on the frontlines of this project the old issues of Comcast and Verizon unresolved inspite of decades of heated debate are more urgent. If anyone doubted Upton Sinclars famous insight here is the evidence.

This sounds very fair to me, India has passed a similar law recently - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/technology/india-amazon-w...

Break yours and let others do it.

Is this really a left/liberal/progressive/dem position and if so why?

I'm mainly on the right and so I don't have a lot of insight into why Sen. Warren would be taking this position. To be frank I kinda would have expected something like this from Trump, not from her. Tech companies like Amazon seem to be left leaning (just looking at Bezos and his investment in WaPo). Wouldn't Warren want strong left leaning tech companies? Why would she want to go up against them?

Again I'm not trying to trigger anyone or make any political assertions. I generally don't understand and would love the input of others for familiar with Sen. Warren's platform.

[0]: http://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-crony-capitalism/

Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left, and if they don't take a hard right turn after the nomination we'll have 4 more years of Trump.

It’s hard to argue when the same side benefitting from big govt wants to print money to “solve” all their problems and shut down opposing virwpoints with such vitrol. One side is actively extatic by shutting down tens of thousands of prospective jobs while not getting that funding and revenue of their projects comes from those jobs.

Once we've broken up the federal government, we can start worrying about these much smaller and less powerful entities!

Also, do you expect people to name names of lobbyists? I think it's pretty safe to assume there are groups who feel that the FAANG companies are too powerful and need to go the way of Bell labs. And many people (wrongly? rightly?) label anything they feel is politically motivated speech as "propaganda".

Early stage startups can't compete for talent in the Bay Area. If breaking up giants creates more competition for talent, then I'm supportive.

Too often it's government intervention which creates the very "problems" that they then turn around and claim to be trying to solve.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening

I think the big three are way too powerful and need to be broken up, but doing so intelligently is a tricky problem that I don't have much faith in government tackling.

Zuckerberg integrating all the services yesterday seems to be a transparent attempt to short circuit splitting the company along these service lines, he knows this is coming. I'll bet $100 he'll soon be talking about how it's impossible to split out insta from facebook because of database keys and integrated AI or whatever.

I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.

Judging by the downvotes I got for mentioning it, you and I must be the only ones on HN that think so.

When Amazon is actually a monopoly.

Until then, they're not. And being good at business is not a problem.

> Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.

> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

[1] https://stallman.org/amazon.html

And it will do nothing to help the millions of American retail workers who are going to be out of a job, nor the logistics workers who are going to be automated out of jobs.

This is populist demagoguery and scapegoating and not looking at real solutions, like strengthening the social safety net by increasing taxes on these businesses. At least Medical for All, Free College, or UBI have tangible, immediate benefits to people suffering.

Or writing laws on Data Privacy can directly address that issue.

But simply busting up companies? It won't address the underlying economic disruption happening, and if anything, it is likely to simply increase the amount of entities tracking you and risk of hacks.

> Here's how to explain to people the distinction between fighting poverty and fighting economic inequality. If you're fighting poverty, you might say "Let's have universal health care." If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. And Larry, please don't start Google." Otherwise Larry's going to mess up your numbers big time.

Since reading that, I've realized that a major part of my political beliefs is that future Larrys should be unable to start future Googles in their current form, and in particular that I don't believe it's a just use of the powers of government to enable the creation of future Googles.

Given recently how AOC and her cohorts were flat out embarrassed by the NY state budget director and given a lesson in basic financial literacy and economics, I think the freshman and sophomore democrats should probably lay low for a while and learn a thing or two from the adults in the room.

Lots of tech "monopoly" power comes from network effects. Once you're Google or Amazon you don't necessarily need to buy up all the other search engines or ecommerce platforms. They can't even get off the ground.

Also interesting: she doesn't mention Apple at all. Yet they run one of the biggest platforms, and their cut (which they call "service revenue") is one of the highest growth categories for them.

[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

Why do we need government’s help to break up these monopolies? When AOL literally was the place everyone went to just be ONLINE, it semed unstoppable. Then came the Web, with its permissionless nature, and over time it completely took over, and led to trillions of dollars of new value. The Web is the plarform on which Google, Amazon, Facebook, built their businesses, companies that would never get permission do that on top of AOL.

Now we need something similar to disrupt Google, Facebook, Amazon. I believe Wordpress was an early start, and indeed powers 30% of all websites today. But you need four things:

1) Open source and permissionless platform

2) A unified Social Operating System with well designed components for user accounts, permissions, realtime notifications, payments etc. like the graphical OSes had windows, menus and so on. A well-designed cathedral architecture like BSD.

3) A permissionless plugin system and marketplace where anyone could develop their own components and package them into plugins and apps, and sell them to communities.

4) A layer where you could go between many different domains and have a seamless social experience. This is key.

I am really passionate about this. I have put my money where my mouth is - my company Qbix has reinvested half a million dollars over the last seven years to build a platform to do just that.

What I said is just the surface. Please watch this video to understand in depthwhat I mean:

https://youtu.be/OzXnVSZbvAw

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Not only do I think the particular policy is ill-conceived, but the preference for legislation when the entire premise is an assessment that existing law is unenforced rather than defective is even more worrying. And I say that as someone who has up to this point seen Warren as probably the strongest 2020 candidate.

Amazon's core competency is logistics. They would not exist at anything like their current scale if they couldn't do 2-day delivery. That's what really gives them a leg up vs doing a Google search, finding a small e-commerce ship that sells what you want, and getting the product.

Breaking that into an independent service-- if it's possible at all-- would have far more impact, and possibly more positive impact, than anything involving house brands or an ec2 split.

Very difficult to not interact with Google...

I choose not to use Verizon... however COMCAST is TERRRIBLE and along with Verizon, they have shut down every mom-and-pop ISP and are responsible for the wholesale elimination of robust, in-place copper from the consumer and business markets.

Senator Warren, please add Comcast\Verizon to this list. That would get my vote... either that or slapping Ajit Pai for me next time you see him. Thanks.

As long as this culture remains in place, breaking big tech companies won't work. New ones will crop up and everything will continue.

She's also very self-serving and has no sense of loyalty to other left-leaning politicians - else she might've backed Bernie from day one in 2016, instead of play things 'safe'. Her playing safe hurt her career more than anything else ever will in my opinion.

That aside, I don't think breaking up google, fb, amazon will do much...if I were to break them up, I think the only thing I'd do is perhaps have them split their cloud services from their other offerings, and maybe media services -- youtube | amazon prime video, but it's small potatoes.

I think a MUCH bigger issue is media consolodation -- when 1-2 CEO's control 80% of the media and thus the 'message' that people see, that's a much scarier proposition.

For example Sinclair Broadcasting I think owns something like 90% of local broadcasting stations now - and they send talking points and control what newscasters say in order to get political messages out - it's basically propaganda that they control, and it's very powerful esp in the wrong hands.

Comcast/nbc/hulu, att/time warner, disney/fox/espn/etc are all companies that probably are more dangerous than google/fb/amazon (w/ the exception that FB really needs to get it's privacy shit together or just die...), and if you're going after big tech why not Apple/Microsoft, Microsoft is as big if not bigger than it was when they had their antitrust case, Apple is the biggest company in the world ? Maybe we should also have a 25BN = auto-breakup for banks, since banks caused the last great recession, and are obviously dangerous when they get too big to fail.

Or maybe instead of breaking up companies we just figure out ways to tax them better -- esp. on speculation and at the investment layer, so that the money they make that 'you - the politician' feel they shouldn't be making is used for the benefit of society as well as enrichment of the CEO and their ilk.

As a progressive, I really want to support Warren but her policies need to solid. I am concerned the left is running off the rails with anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, anti-technology, extreme feminist wackadoodle ideas.

Can't just Bernie just dye his hair and wear a proper suit that fits?

NOTE: I'm not dissing the monopolies act and understand the dangers. This is just a thought pointing out different yardsticks for corporations and countries.

Like what exactly?

I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens with his wealth in the second and third generation. Historically in fedualism this was passed down to the next generation and the family would keep it until end of the feudalism era. In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 egenerations, especially with people like Bill Gates. Not sure what is the problem here.

The reality is that people compete for status, success, money, and power, within the framework they are given.

I mean we've actually tried this. If you take a group of incredibly skilled business people and tax them heavily you don't get some dystopia, you get Switzerland.

This used to be less true in CS, but that's changing due to machine learning. Google has a huge leg-up in self-driving-car R&D because of the enormous amount of data it has from Google services. In "hard" R&D, even "startups" are spending the kind of capital that previously used to only be in the province of established conglomerates.

> Indeed, 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third, according to the Williams Group wealth consultancy.

What is that? Sounds like a marketing claim by a company catering services to the wealthy about how to keep their family wealth. I can't just accept it blindly.

I agree that in the (unusual) case of Gates, he's obviously not just hoarding and passing on his wealth directly, but the upbringing and advantages his kids are getting plus $10 million leaves them still really wealthy compared to nearly anyone else on the planet regardless of the fact that it's a miniscule fraction of Gates' current wealth.

Even if Comcast et al. get broken up, we'll probably just end up with poor customer service from the resultant components until they merge.

Paying $110/month for a business line with 50 down / 10 up, while recently i was offered then refused a promotion upgrade to $140/month with 150 down / 25 up for 3 years. After three years, the pricing goes close $300.

Quite deceiving pushy sales people and their offerings with reduction in current pricing. I am considered a loyal grandfathered customer, yet i am totally stuck... :(

An antitrust breakup of Comcast would be one or both of:

1. splitting off different lines of business, such as the content production parts from the physical cable service part, or

2. splitting them into different companies geographically.

Neither of these would do much to increase your ISP options.

These monolithic companies are sucking up all of the power in our economy and have destroyed the competitive markets. As the Economist recently said "Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition." https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-...

Capitalism without competition isn't really capitalism, but feudalism.

They should be broken up.

I never said that it was.

Google is really the issue. They are dominant in search, browser, and maps, and they're half the mobile duopoly. It's very difficult to avoid using their products entirely and even if you did, their dominance allows them to dictate how the internet works, to a certain extent.

I prefer breaking up monopolies if the end result will be a healthier, consumer-focused and competition driven market.

Given that this is an Elizabeth Warren idea, I'm suspicious that the motives are anything having to do with creating a vibrant market... :)

And if we take a step back: this isn't necessarily only about privacy, but about capitalism and competition. Data-miner customers, and data-miner subjects might both get a better deal if there were competition between the middle men, at least more than now.

Verizon and Comcast could play the same game, but they're still more about money than influence - which is why they've chosen to make their stand on killing net neutrality, not on influencing referendums and elections.

FB particularly is incredibly toxic to genuine democracy - not necessarily more toxic than some of the other monsters in the mainstream media shark tank, but certainly not a company that should be allowed to run riot without oversight.

I figured people would take a couple minutes to educate themselves about the candidates, but I forgot that I wasn't in my home country.

Is there a candidate that has done more than Warren in this regard? (not criticizing, I'm legitimately curious)

Or you can un-ironically google “google lobbying” and find more detailed articles about Google’s lobbying published by time, fortune, Bloomberg, etc...

That's a key distinction. Are there any actual monopolies (I don't mean companies that are merely dominant) that are not backed by government?

That said, I'm in favor of the former. Citizens United has been a pox on representatives representing their constituents, which has made lobbying all the more effective and easy.

Ads are worthless on their own.

And that's really a shame, because you're also dead on about the logistics/product point. I almost mentioned that, but it's complicated by competition from Walmart, Target, et al. Upvoted you on that basis. That similar to my point of "ad distribution / ad sourcing" split on FB and Google.

People often misrepresent the MS trial.

I mean it was and still is dependent on MSHTML for rendering things like the help system as well as rich text in many pre-XAML apps. You don’t want the icon on your desktop, fine, but it certainly is a core part of the OSs rendering system.

> "Google said it lobbied on dozens of issues, reflecting how integral its services have become to American lives and commerce. The filing cited privacy, data security, antitrust, taxes, tariffs, trade, the opioid crisis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, immigration, the future of work, encryption and national security."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/google-se....

It's not really that surprising, because they're not only affected by it but on multiple fronts.

There was a time when Google spent hardly anything on lobbying. Meanwhile Hollywood was promoting things like SOPA, Microsoft was at one point operating a major anti-Google lobbying campaign, ISPs want to violate network neutrality, etc.

It's one thing to not want to fight, something else to not respond when provoked.

It seemed have helped in the Ma Bell[0] days[1].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

2016, but still..

Regarding trust busting, it is worth noting that these tech giants give an immense amount of money and support to the left. Might as well give Warren some bipartisan support so we can thrash them a bit---it would be sweet poetic justice to attack these statist zealots with the very government power they worship.

they're taking all this money from venture capitalists funding startups running on AWS, and pumping it into their retail operation so that the working class can have cheaper goods.

and everyone involved in the process consents to it, even!

So I'm a lot more worried about Amazon than the IRS - I feel the IRS is in fact accountable to me in a way which Amazon isn't.

I really believe it doesn't. No serious concentration of wealth ever does. Yes, personal attitudes in SV are often liberal, but the economic outlook most common in the place is akin to Andrew Carnegie with a git repo. It's this economic outlook where her proposal targets.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/7/17208804/amazon-private-labe...

Amazon is approaching 50% market share. They are close to becoming the place for online commerce. So when they compete with vendors by offering similar products, the vendors are effectively put out of business.

Just like with MS and IE. The issue wasn't so much that MS offered IE with Windows so much as the fact that 95% of computers came with Windows, so bundling IE was putting other software providers out of business.

This may be worth it for society, but it's a little too convenient to say no people will be harmed.

Not really — my option is basically "indirectly support AWS" or "forego large swaths of the Internet." Site owners have to choose between directly supporting AWS, indirectly supporting AWS via intermediary services that use it, or giving up the economies of scale that AWS's dominance allows.

> That's like asking the government to break up the react framework because more sites are using it and you have no jquery option.

This is not analogous. AWS is a company. React is an open source project.

This is largely false: look at market share of all their competitors — network effects are really hard to replace.

The physical infrastructure is what makes everything on top of it possible, and at the same time it is one of the most expensive pieces to build, upgrade, and maintain. There needs to be adequate returns on investment in the infrastructure, and that's hard to do in the unbundled model.

If you want high-quality infrastructure, you need to let the infrastructure builder capture a sufficient portion of the value created by that infrastructure. Consider trains. Trains create value for people using the train to get around, but also value for the real estate by the train station. If you only let the train company recover from the rider, you won't incentives that reflect the true value of investing in the train.

Look at Japan, where train service is exceptional. The train company gets to charge both sides. They charge fares to riders, but also are major land owners around train stations, and charge rent to the businesses who benefit from having train service near them. If you had your model in Japan, where train companies just own the tracks and get a modest fee for allowing people to use them, you would not see that kind of high-quality train service.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

Do you believe the US government has the ability to simply prohibit speech by corporate entities? Is it in accordance with free speech principles for a federal government to prohibit certain types of speech?

They did drive out the competition. The Baby Bells inherited the existing infrastructure. Most competing carriers relied on regulations that allowed them to lease access at wholesale rates. The Baby Bells got those regulations overturned. Investors weren't lining up to fund duplicate infrastructure anyway but especially not when the Baby Bells could tie up any project in court for months or years.

Dividing a national monopoly into regional monopolies did almost nothing to improve competition. Vertical disintegration did while it lasted.

The only companies that really managed to compete with the Baby Bells were cable companies, which had built out infrastructure before they started competing.

Which companies were those? Netflix and google both made statements that they support net neutrality, but I didn't see them lift a finger to do anything about it: it seems to have been mostly a pr move.

> In retrospect breaking up MS between Windows and Office was not a necessary condition to breaking MS's monopoly.

Quite the contrary. Since their monopoly is still in full force neither the meager settlement nor the market transformation were sufficient to break the monopoly. Breaking up OS/Office might have been enough but we'll never know.

So does every department and grocery store in the US, and they have for decades, but nobody seems terribly bothered by Great Value at Walmart, or the the notorious contract negotiations with Walmart that put suppliers at a huge disadvantage, because if you want to be a national brand you need to be in Walmart.

But it's much better to talk about fantasy monopolies because they make nice sound bites.

You know and I know that that's not true. People stick with things because of inertia, convenience, network effects, … To use a tech analogy, many people back in the day hated Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop and server operating system market but very few initially changed to MacOS or Linux. To this day Microsoft still has a stranglehold on the consumer desktop market, the difference being that smartphones and tablets and chromebooks (browser appliances) have given people alternatives.

No, for me (a European) lots and lots refers to the many people outside of the US that would like to see non-US companies taking a bigger slice of the tech pie. Of course Americans are going to have less of a problem with US companies dominating the web.

I hold no firm political allegiance other than it is clear the establishment is happy with the status quo, anybody who promises to tackle concentrations of power in either big media, big tech, big finance, big you name it, gets my approval. If we spent some time talking about concrete issues and policies I bet we'd agree on a lot of things!

why

YT is integrated at every level from infrastructure on up. It depends on Google-internal libraries which are in turn integrated with other parts of the infrastructure... It would pretty much amount to a full from-scratch rewrite of almost the entire product.

Moreover, I'd question whether other providers even have the available public resource capacity to support YT.

As to cellular—it’s a viable alternative for lots of people. Many people don’t need more than 10-20 hours of high quality video per month. 20% of people are already smartphone-only users, and that figure is growing. At the same time, those data caps are growing. Verizon’s 5G service has no data cap. Even if there is a soft cap of a few hundred GB, that’ll be a viable wired replacement for most people.

The trend in tech, by contrast, is the opposite. We’re not on the precipice of increased competition in search or mobile OSs. Indeed, with Microsoft throwing in the towel on Windows Mobile, there is less competition in that space than ever.

I couldn't care less about Facebook. Yet, while I certainly could live without Amazon (or Whole Foods), their service is very nice and WF has things I can't buy at other grocery stores around me.

AWS profits were worth a few hundred billion over the past seven years. As Amazon only as $40 billion in cash on hand, it's hard to argue they haven't put that money to good use.

For instance, Apple makes hardware, software, services and they all fit together perfectly. Tesla distributes cars in addition to making them, leading to a better buying experience.

Everything Amazon does is in-line with this principle as well.

Is the end game laws similar to what we have for alcoholic beverages and cars? Where distribution and manufacturing are artificially separated?

You’d think we would hear more about it since basically every physical retailer owns their own brands that they sell in their own marketplaces already.

> ... legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform. Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.” These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.

If you take the view that cellular or DSL aren't legitimate competition (despite having double-digit marketshare even where Comcast has no other competition), then Bing and Yahoo! aren't competition for Google either. In which case Google has a nationwide monopoly in search.

I'm not just throwing stones here. I'd welcome some clarification from GP.

> By definition, non-horizontal mergers involve firms that do not operate in the same market. It necessarily follows that such mergers produce no immediate change in the level of concentration in any relevant market as defined in Section 2 of these Guidelines.

The Merger Enforcement Division's assumption may have been true in 1997 but it's difficult to argue that simply because Google and Amazon don't operate in the "same market" as their primary businesses that their combination would "produce no immediate change in the level of concentration" of the market for both online advertising and computing services. Yet, under these guidelines, if a Google + Amazon merger were proposed it wouldn't present any immediate issue for the Antitrust Division to oppose it.

[1]https://www.justice.gov/atr/non-horizontal-merger-guidelines

It's impossible to prove in most cases because it may have nothing to do with intent.

Amazon's advantage in 'groceries' is inherently structural.

They can sell bananas for 10 cents less than Safeway because their opex may be subsidized, or they can transport cheaper, not 'because they are acting predatorily'.

The nature of this value chain overlap is inherently problematic.

The thought of 'putting grocery chains out of business using surpluses from AWS' never has to even cross Bezo's mind, or the minds of anyone in the entirety of Amazon. It can happen due simply to structural issues.

For much the same way, it's impossible to have a free trade deal with China, so long as they have political controlled financial system and currency. 'Dumping' will be an artifact of the system as a whole. Nobody even needs to think it for it to happen.

By 1915 America had higher GDP per capita than most of Western Europe - BEFORE WW1. Western Europe had higher GDP per capita than China/India by like 1200 AD. You are so so far off the mark.

Also, India's population only started exponentially growing in the late 1800s. By that point America had already industralized and was already the richest.

Go ahead and put your money where you mouth is, sell all of your US stock, and invest in African stocks since population growth is apparently the only thing that matters.

Right now, it feels like companies like Google are mostly silencing hate speech, violent extremists, and pornography, but there is no guarantee that their censorship will remain that way in the future. In a not-so-hypothetical future where a single private company has taken almost whole control over online media and starts imposing heavy censorship over non-offensive speech, are we going to continue saying "it's a private company, and if you don't like it, you can just share your opinions on this platform that nobody reads"?

This is like saying if you don't like the debate happening in your city hall or town square, go to the small gathering in the woods to have your conversations.. where no one will hear you, and what you say will have no impact.

I know this the analogy is flawed because there is no "public space" on the Internet.. The places we have chosen to hold our public discourse online are all privately owned..

It's a challenging problem and "go somewhere else" is not a viable solution because it marginalizes and suppresses unpopular opinions or minority groups..

It's certainly a benefit from the view of the Chinese government.

Actually, many economists - and perhaps most of them - argue that what's fundamental to monopolization concerns is the presence of undue barriers to entry that make the market non-contestable. "Market share" and "choice" are not helpful on their own, because a big market share could be entirely due to the incumbent pursuing efficiency and the consumer's best interests, so as to keep themselves ahead of any possible competitors. But this is a benign dynamic that will be quickly corrected should the incumbent fall behind, as competitors would quickly enter the market.

I actually think Android is a really bad example precisely because all the useful google apps ARE separate from the OS. Its just that what people think of as android is actually mostly Play Services now.

1. Raise prices for customers since now someone has to pay for Android development/upkeep/progress, or

2. Starve and kill Android and leave customers with just one major app store (Apple)?

Pop sockets got in a fight recently with Amazon, because they wanted to stay FBA in order to have better control of selection and pricing, but Amazon was trying to force them into a more traditional vendor role.

Though, just so you know where I'm coming from, in my ideal world it would be strong social and business pressures that enforced the idea of protected classes, not regulation. I'd support any competitor which was more ethical, but complex issue.

This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.

Additionally, and far more importantly: Comcast is a regional monopoly. They have a lot of power in some geographic areas of the United States. Google is a global monopoly that has power in nearly every home on the planet. You shouldn't be willing to strengthen a global monopoly to try to fight a regional one.

A progressive corporate tax still makes some sense, and there's basically no excuse for their taxes being less simple than a citizen's. However active management is still required. Markets are fast and efficient but they are often dumb.

The point is: you can give big companies whatever rate you want, but they're in the strongest position to circumvent it, and they will. The better choice is to lower taxes substantially and give the smaller companies a chance to accumulate capital faster, so they can compete.

Changing tax rates don't fix either of those.

Large companies are perceived as being proportionally beneficial to the US economy. If you made the US a place that was meaningfully undesirable for corporations, they can leave. And even if these companies did not leave, you would strongly deter new companies. For instance imagine you were able to create your system such that it could not be simply avoided through various typical methods. So big companies really did risk losing up to 50% of their net. How long would it take before e.g. YCombinator started requiring new companies to incorporate in e.g. Hong Kong (or wherever) instead of the US? Perhaps even moving the entire operation abroad.

So even though I think this would be an absolutely incredible idea, I do not think it would work or be meaningfully considered in practice.

The government running an entire industry, even the threat of such a thing, is a great way to completely destroy innovation in that industry. Why would I invest in research if it's a real possibility the government can come in and take everything from me for nothing?

What you're suggesting doesn't create a free market, it creates a dead market.

When ISPs decide that they should charge more for all video traffic, the smaller companies can't pay it but the larger ones can. Why would the ISPs act in the benefit of small companies when they can make more by charging more for all streaming video.

That seems suspect to me...

I think it is different. When a department store buys a third-party product, it pays for it and the Store bears the risk of the item not selling. If Macy's decides to make their own brand, they did so by transferring risk from manufacturer to themselves in the beginning; if a product didn't sell enough, they had stake in it. There are some successes (store-brands) and some failures (brands they bought, never worked)

In the Amazon Basics case, AMZN doesn't own inventory for the product at all. All the risk is to be borne by the 3rd party manufacturer. When Amazon looks at its data and sees a product succeeding, it creates a Basics product with no risk - it knows this thing sells. There is no way Amazon can 'fail' per se.

This essentially is the difference. Any manufacturer is likely scared of success on the Amazon Marketplace. If too successful, it can be Amazon-Basic'ed.

> The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup.

I think in the short-term for that product - yes, the consumer finds a cheaper product, but Amazon will always have an economies-of-scale advantage.

However, long-term, I think innovators will not know if making a highly successful product (which is always difficult to sell cheap because scale isn't achieved) is worth it.

I found this episode from Planet Money pretty informative: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

It's 100% the exact same thing. Go to Walmart and see thousands of "Great Value" products and you'll get the exact same thing. Warren is off her rocker on this one. We have real tech monopolies in the Cable/ISP industry but we're talking about Amazon and Facebook.

The difference would be Amazon's [alleged] monopoly power.

> 2) The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup. The play is not to undercut all the power strip sellers (to take an example) and once they are out of business, jack up the price. The play is to take the margin due to marketing and brand equity from the sellers and split it between the consumer and Jeff Bezos, so rather than being harmed, the consumer benefits from this.

That seems like a very charitable way of describing the situation, and even if accurate may only remain true in the short term. Whether undercutting branded sellers is the goal or not, that's exactly what's happening--even as you charitably describe it. What happens ten years down the road when those brands are gone due to Amazon's allegedly benevolent undercutting?

I'm not sure about the ultimate merits here (in fact, I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that Amazon has all of the market power that some say it does). But I think you may be dismissing this all a bit too quickly.

I don't think that you could get any reasonably representative range of economists in a room to even agree that this is ever a better option, so I think your claim to objectivity is unwarranted.

And the reason they don't have more market share is because Chrome is still faster and provides a better experience on average than Firefox does. I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. But when I try to get others to switch, those that end up not switching try for a few days and run into horrible performance issues that cripple their browsing experience. Clearly this isn't a universal issue (my experience is fine), but it's a big enough issue that it likely hampers further adoption.

I pretty much never hear "Firefox doesn't work properly on X site" as a reason they can't use Firefox. In the end, people use Chrome because it tends to give a better experience for people, even given its lack of respect for their privacy.

Still I agree breaking up Comcast is not the solution. You will just end up with smaller more localized monopolies. That's pretty much what happened with Bell after all.

The solution would be either nationalizing the infrastructure and leasing it to operators or forcing existing operators to rent their infrastructure to their competitors for a set price. The later is actually working quite well in France. Short of that you will never get competition. It's simply not profitable.

What's the purpose of monopoly laws? What is their spirit? Consumer benefit, right? If that is better served by municipal utilities, then while it may not violate the word of antitrust, it certainly violates the spirit.

Which is why I said, literally, "their behavior crosses into anti-competitive." You can compete with vendors, or you can control most of the market. But you can't do both: control the market, then use that advantage to drive competition out of business.

> Even in the eCommerce market their share is around 50%.

50% is a staggeringly high market share. For reference, Toyota has less than 10% market share.

> Citation needed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot...

http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/

> And Amazon does not build them, they license another companies product.

Those companies are accusing amazon of literally copying their unique products. We're not talking about buying batteries or something from a supplier. Amazon is literally copying existing products that do well.

Here's an ex-employee discussing the topic:

> Amazon sees your product is doing very well, they have the retained performance data, and Amazon copies to their best of their ability as a “generic version.” Through subtle advertising, and imitations of the successful attributes of your product, their product cuts straight to the top ranked in your categories.

https://www.skubana.com/the-best-kept-secrets-of-amazons-ama...

And how quickly is France's number going to grow given that France's second largest ISP recently cancelled its plans to deploy fiber? https://www.reuters.com/article/altice-sfr-france/altice-aba....

Also note that the French deployment is being heavily subsidized by the government (to the tune of $24 billion). Except for a small amount during the post-2008 economic stimulus, broadband deployment in the U.S. is not subsidized. Whereas the French government is paying a direct subsidy to build fiber in rural areas, in the U.S. rural deployment is financed by a cross subsidy (taxing ISPs in urban areas to subsidize ISPs in rural ones).