4 ms·

There's one thing PG seems to implicitly which is that the movement from small company to large, dominating company in a vertical is a good thing. Ultimately s

There's one thing PG seems to implicitly which is that the movement from small company to large, dominating company in a vertical is a good thing. Ultimately startups seem to be producing winner-take-all companies. I do not believe this is a healthy thing for the economy or even rights of the consumer in the long run. There are a lot of services where if you do not like their terms, there may not be a great practical alternative. I don't want to see much changed, but I do feel the government should be encouraging competition much more than it is today. I do not think Facebook should have been allowed to buy Instagram, and I think WhatsApp should have been fined an enormous amount for blocking the words "Telegram" to stall their competitor. We put in the Sherman Antitrust laws to reign in behavior in the Gilded age and we should have a modern equivalent to encourage not one Google but 10 Googles in a market. I'm clearly asking for too much, but after all the recent Airline consolidation several studies have proven that prices are now higher in certain markets as a result of lost competition. Capitalism doesn't magically prevent monopoly or oligopoly - it is up to us to put the right checks and balances in place.

bad_user 11y ago
There are natural monopolies and there are government granted monopolies and personally I believe the later are doing more harm than the former. Historically technology has made natural monopolies obsolete, but technology cannot bypass the law. Because when that happens, new trade agreements can be made and the law can simply be changed. If getting rid of monopolies is the goal, we could get rid of patents and copyrights, government granted monopolies which are about creating artificial scarcity.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
The actual story of the Sherman Act isn't empirically defensible - J.D. Rockefeller became much richer overnight mainly because of the splits and prices don't seem to have changed much. But J.D. Rockefeller was rather single minded, set on reducing cost to the end consumer for Yankee cultural reasons. Higher price may or may not be worse price. With airlines, you live with Robert Crandall's "no airline ever returned its cost in capital" so it's difficult to make any of that make sense :) Many economists warn "never reason from a price change."

bad_user 11y ago

There are natural monopolies and there are government granted monopolies and personally I believe the later are doing more harm than the former. Historically technology has made natural monopolies obsolete, but technology cannot bypass the law. Because when that happens, new trade agreements can be made and the law can simply be changed. If getting rid of monopolies is the goal, we could get rid of patents and copyrights, government granted monopolies which are about creating artificial scarcity.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

The actual story of the Sherman Act isn't empirically defensible - J.D. Rockefeller became much richer overnight mainly because of the splits and prices don't seem to have changed much. But J.D. Rockefeller was rather single minded, set on reducing cost to the end consumer for Yankee cultural reasons. Higher price may or may not be worse price. With airlines, you live with Robert Crandall's "no airline ever returned its cost in capital" so it's difficult to make any of that make sense :) Many economists warn "never reason from a price change."