17 ms·

Standard Oil Company Must Dissolve in 6 Months (1911)

101 points by davidbarker 10y ago

arthurcolle 10y ago
I didn't know about 'timesmachine' - is this new?
- caminante 10y ago
  I think it dates back to 2008-ish[0]. NYT's also been adding archives and features[1]. The latter gives an overview of their approach to the technical challenges of serving up MB's of data from scans. Tl;dr, NYT tiled the scans into "digital maps." [0] http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine/ http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine... [1] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-timesmachine/ http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-time...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There are also electronic archives of the Times available through many library systems. Inquire at your public or community college library (in the US).
noobermin 10y ago
I'm a pretty lib guy, but let's be honest, could we have the iphone/macbook without apple? ibm? intel? Not everything can be done "fast", although I grant many things can't be done slow, and as recent years have shown, more and more can be done by those "fast moving" companies also. I think the question of whether big business should exist is at this point no longer really an open question. Instead, it is important for us to regulate them. Dissolving the concept of a big business is throwing out the baby with the bath water. I feel like even big businesses as institutions can provide some good in society that smaller organizations not always can.
- caoilte 10y ago
  The usual argument is that Apple/IBM/Intel have innovated simply because they do not hold monopolies. If they were to achieve monopoly domination they would have a duty of care to their shareholders to spend the money that they currently spend on innovating on preventing competitors from entering the marketplace. Don't confuse monopolies with big business. Your electricity utility company, your cable internet/(?television?)/(?phone?) company are monopolies. Arguably, Google is a search monoopoly. Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    The article does not deal with monopolies but the existence of big business. Either that or I misread it.
    - caoilte 10y ago
      You appear to have misread the article. Not difficult. They use language very differently to the way we do today. A key line, 'They [representatives of big business] regarded with especial favor the establishment of the proposition that a combination must be in "unreasonable" restraint of commerce to be unlawful' They're basically saying, "phew just because the government went after Standard Oil, doesn't mean it will come after us next because we are also big." In those days they talked a lot about "trust busting". This is a monopoly when one company creates an artificial market or a cartel when several do.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    This reminds me of this RWT thread though: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=158487&curpostid=158487 http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=158487&curposti...
- xenadu02 10y ago
  The debate at the time was whether a business of a certain large size or that met certain criteria was a de-facto anti-trust violation or if it had to also engage in price-fixing and other monopoly behaviors. The court decided that it had to engage in direct monopoly behavior. Rightly or wrongly this is what allows a market with 2-3 players who own 90+% of all sales to function as an effective monopoly trust. It's a prisoners dilemma and all know there is nothing to be gained by actually competing - so they don't meaningfully do so (or put out a few fig leaves to pretend to compete). Because they never actually conclude an agreement to fix prices they aren't doing anything illegal. You could interpret the law such that a de-facto monopoly was illegal but that definitely has a lot of problems of its own. I'm not sure where I come down on this issue. Having everything dominated by huge corporations is bad for society overall, but it does provide a lot of opportunity for startups to disrupt things. Unfortunately money (thus power) is so concentrated we are increasingly seeing the legacy players turn to campaign contributions and political games to snuff out competition. Yet some amount of regulation is far preferable to the alternative. Definitely difficult to strike a good balance.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  "could we have the iphone/macbook without apple? ibm? intel? " I am starting to wonder if we would have better tech if Apple (or Microsoft before that and IBM before that) weren't as dominant. It seems big companies do something new and push the envelope for a while but then they suppress other innovation.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    You can see that with how MS kinda stagnated around the 2000s, and then surged forward from Vista onwards. Damn it, XP was their longest ever supported Windows release.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  A large part of the reason we have Unix, and Linux, and MacOS, is because of AT&T. And the 1950s anti-trust consent decree. Which draws back to the first anti-trust actions against AT&T in 1917, for specifically refusing to interconnect local telco traffic across AT&T's network. Pretty much precisely the current network neutrality argument a century ago, as it happens. So, in 1956, yet another consent decree prohibited AT&T from selling "computer systems". Which, in 1969, Dennis Ritchy and Ken Thompson had created. Prohibited by law from selling this, they instead gave it away. The OS plus source code were rapidly adopted by many university campuses (who needed a cheap but useful computing platform), particularly M.I.T. and most especially, Berkely, who extended the system tremendously. The question of how and where and why innovations happen (and how useful they are) is a deep one. I'm leaning toward a mix of a fostering environment (sufficient resources for creativity), an unbiased selection process, and lowered barriers to useful contributions and applications. Whether "big business" specifically aids or retards that process depends hugely on many specific circumstances. In related areas, AT&T specifically opposed development of packet-switched networks as threats to its core business model. They didn't want to be just a data mule. Much the same as today's wireless telephony providers don't. I doubt that'll save them. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-for-the-success-of-unix/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-f...
- nandemo 10y ago
  > I think the question of whether big business should exist is at this point no longer really an open question. Uh, that wasn't never the question, not even in 1911. It was and is about anti-competitive business practices.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I would say yes. For anyone tracking the mobile phone market, there was other companies coming up with devices that were damn close to the iPhone but didn't get the traction in the press that Apple products got.
DavidSJ 10y ago
Interestingly, they included the full text of the Supreme Court decision in the article. I guess they could just link to the PDF these days, but would the New York Times have included the full text in the early 90's? Edit: Also of note is the notice of the first "aero-taxi" beginning service in Paris. Edit 2: And reading the article, we see that concern over "activist judges legislating from the bench" is nothing new.
- SilasX 10y ago
  As recently as 1998, newspapers included the full Starr Report (investigation of the Clinton/Lewsinsky scandal) in their paper edition.
  - april1stislame 10y ago
    If anything ever needed the full details that would be the president's blowjobs...
abcampbell 10y ago
This will happen to Google. Sooner than people realize. (From another story on the front page) http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-students-suit-claims-google-scanned-accounts-without-permission/1 http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-st...
- beambot 10y ago
  Alphabet is already fractionating the various business units into quasi-independent companies. There's a good case to be made that they're already taking measures to mitigate a antitrust-bust.
  - baq 10y ago
    is it possible for them to do something to search that would prevent such an outcome? and what does splitting search even mean - the word 'google' appears on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of current age?
    - toast0 10y ago
      The way to avoid an anti trust ruling is probably to voluntarily limit their actions to what would be allowed under a consent decree. That's a bit hard to predict, though. I would be careful about featuring products on top of search results, because that seems to irritate regulators (although all the other search engines do it, and it can be good user experience); also I would be careful about bundling requirements for google play services. If broken up, I would imagine at least three companies would result: Web search, advertising, and everything else.
- eloff 10y ago
  Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the competition is. I don't see Google doing that. The market is open to competition, and Google is very disruptable, if somehow you think you can do a better job than they do. If another Larry and Sergey came along with a search engine that was significantly better, they'd disrupt Google just as easily as the original Larry and Sergey did to whatever was popular before them (I don't even remember.) Do they have the vast majority of the market share? Yes. But they also have plenty of competitors and there's no lock in for people searching, nor a high pain threshold for people to switch search engines. The reason Google holds such a dominant position is simply that their search results are best. If that weren't the case, I'd switch today, and so would you.
williesleg 10y ago
Everyone has an agenda.
ginko 10y ago
How can the NYT claim copyright on a 1911 news article?
- Someone 10y ago
  Everybody can claim that copyright; what a court thinks of such a claim is something else. In this case, the copyright claim likely is not on the original paper or its text, but on the site.
ck2 10y ago
I'm stunned by the 1 cent price. That means in 100 years the newstand price went up 250x Can't just be inflation. Must have been competition and abundant advertisers.
- chillacy 10y ago
  Or trying to squeeze more money out of a smaller readerbase? http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-of-single-copy-sales/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-of... 1 cent in 1913 => 24 cents today http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I'm not sure how much a single issue costs today, but the cheapest you can get NYT for is 75 cents a day: http://daggle.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 http://daggle.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480
  - ck2 10y ago
    Newstand price is $2.50 inside and outside NYC for daily and $5 Sunday http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-Hike-50-Cents-3-Dollars-136619908.html http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-Hi...
    - chillacy 10y ago
      Damn, that's... terrible. News is cheap these days with the internet and all, but I guess that just means I have no brand loyalty.
- kristianp 10y ago
  Newspapers have consolidated over the years, these days there's one per metro area. One reason why Warren Buffett bought part of the Washington Post. "If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station — I'm talking of the past — you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference." http://www.businessinsider.com.au/warren-buffett-good-business-could-be-run-by-idiot-2016-3?r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com.au/warren-buffett-good-busine...
rckclmbr 10y ago
Standard Oil consisted of 5% of the US GDP at the time, and controlled the entire refining process. Google is still pretty far away from that. One thing I find interesting though is that Rockefeller feared Teddy Roosevelt being elected, just like Google fears Bernie Sanders. Bernie and Roosevelt hate big business for the same reasons. Interestingly, the top tech companies think monopoly is good for the same reasons that Rockefeller did -- that they can hyperoptimize the entire process, and the winners are the consumers because of cheaper prices and higher quality. That assumes the business operates in the consumers best interests, however...
- sharkjacobs 10y ago
  fun trivia: when google was refactored into alphabet they changed their corporate motto from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing"
silentrob 10y ago
This reminds me of a TV mini series a saw on History a few months back - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America As a Canadian I found the history piece fascinating, and something I missed in school.
voodootrucker 10y ago
Given that corporations have now gotten more powerful than the governments that regulate them, I doubt we'll see this happen nowadays (but it desperately needs to happen, to Comcast, Google, etc) Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016 (and pretty much the whole cable lobby, VW scandal, etc)
- shrewduser 10y ago
  Comcast I get but why Google? and who's etc exactly?
coin 10y ago
Horrible usability on an iPad, just serve me the content without trying to be clever
bbanyc 10y ago
When Exxon (formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil of New York) merged, some wags commented that the old trust was coming back together, and Rockefeller would be proud. It wasn't the whole thing, though - the trust also included Chevron (Standard of California) and a few companies (Sohio, Amoco, Arco) since bought up by BP. And I'm sure I'm missing a few.
msane 10y ago
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/ http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/ is such a well done site. NYT always knocks it out of the park on web products.
digi_owl 10y ago
I think the term monopoly is a distraction. Shifts the focus too much towards raw sales numbers, where the real issue is how much of a mental presence the company has within the marketplace. Any time a company, or group of companies, are large enough that they can dictate the direction and speed of change, be worried. As they are as likely to not move it at all.
Conky 10y ago
Why not do to google what the government did to the big bell to create all the little bells. All the R&D money would not have been spent if there was only one! Google's Ad platforms are limiting how we are able to see and experience different forms of exchange without without advertising imbedded.

101 points by davidbarker 10y ago

arthurcolle 10y ago

I didn't know about 'timesmachine' - is this new?

caminante 10y ago
I think it dates back to 2008-ish[0]. NYT's also been adding archives and features[1]. The latter gives an overview of their approach to the technical challenges of serving up MB's of data from scans. Tl;dr, NYT tiled the scans into "digital maps." [0] http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine/ http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine... [1] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-timesmachine/ http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-time...
dredmorbius 10y ago
There are also electronic archives of the Times available through many library systems. Inquire at your public or community college library (in the US).

noobermin 10y ago

I'm a pretty lib guy, but let's be honest, could we have the iphone/macbook without apple? ibm? intel? Not everything can be done "fast", although I grant many things can't be done slow, and as recent years have shown, more and more can be done by those "fast moving" companies also. I think the question of whether big business should exist is at this point no longer really an open question. Instead, it is important for us to regulate them. Dissolving the concept of a big business is throwing out the baby with the bath water. I feel like even big businesses as institutions can provide some good in society that smaller organizations not always can.

caoilte 10y ago
The usual argument is that Apple/IBM/Intel have innovated simply because they do not hold monopolies. If they were to achieve monopoly domination they would have a duty of care to their shareholders to spend the money that they currently spend on innovating on preventing competitors from entering the marketplace. Don't confuse monopolies with big business. Your electricity utility company, your cable internet/(?television?)/(?phone?) company are monopolies. Arguably, Google is a search monoopoly. Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones.
- noobermin 10y ago
  The article does not deal with monopolies but the existence of big business. Either that or I misread it.
  - caoilte 10y ago
    You appear to have misread the article. Not difficult. They use language very differently to the way we do today. A key line, 'They [representatives of big business] regarded with especial favor the establishment of the proposition that a combination must be in "unreasonable" restraint of commerce to be unlawful' They're basically saying, "phew just because the government went after Standard Oil, doesn't mean it will come after us next because we are also big." In those days they talked a lot about "trust busting". This is a monopoly when one company creates an artificial market or a cartel when several do.
- yuhong 10y ago
  This reminds me of this RWT thread though: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=158487&curpostid=158487 http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=158487&curposti...
xenadu02 10y ago
The debate at the time was whether a business of a certain large size or that met certain criteria was a de-facto anti-trust violation or if it had to also engage in price-fixing and other monopoly behaviors. The court decided that it had to engage in direct monopoly behavior. Rightly or wrongly this is what allows a market with 2-3 players who own 90+% of all sales to function as an effective monopoly trust. It's a prisoners dilemma and all know there is nothing to be gained by actually competing - so they don't meaningfully do so (or put out a few fig leaves to pretend to compete). Because they never actually conclude an agreement to fix prices they aren't doing anything illegal. You could interpret the law such that a de-facto monopoly was illegal but that definitely has a lot of problems of its own. I'm not sure where I come down on this issue. Having everything dominated by huge corporations is bad for society overall, but it does provide a lot of opportunity for startups to disrupt things. Unfortunately money (thus power) is so concentrated we are increasingly seeing the legacy players turn to campaign contributions and political games to snuff out competition. Yet some amount of regulation is far preferable to the alternative. Definitely difficult to strike a good balance.
maxxxxx 10y ago
"could we have the iphone/macbook without apple? ibm? intel? " I am starting to wonder if we would have better tech if Apple (or Microsoft before that and IBM before that) weren't as dominant. It seems big companies do something new and push the envelope for a while but then they suppress other innovation.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  You can see that with how MS kinda stagnated around the 2000s, and then surged forward from Vista onwards. Damn it, XP was their longest ever supported Windows release.
dredmorbius 10y ago
A large part of the reason we have Unix, and Linux, and MacOS, is because of AT&T. And the 1950s anti-trust consent decree. Which draws back to the first anti-trust actions against AT&T in 1917, for specifically refusing to interconnect local telco traffic across AT&T's network. Pretty much precisely the current network neutrality argument a century ago, as it happens. So, in 1956, yet another consent decree prohibited AT&T from selling "computer systems". Which, in 1969, Dennis Ritchy and Ken Thompson had created. Prohibited by law from selling this, they instead gave it away. The OS plus source code were rapidly adopted by many university campuses (who needed a cheap but useful computing platform), particularly M.I.T. and most especially, Berkely, who extended the system tremendously. The question of how and where and why innovations happen (and how useful they are) is a deep one. I'm leaning toward a mix of a fostering environment (sufficient resources for creativity), an unbiased selection process, and lowered barriers to useful contributions and applications. Whether "big business" specifically aids or retards that process depends hugely on many specific circumstances. In related areas, AT&T specifically opposed development of packet-switched networks as threats to its core business model. They didn't want to be just a data mule. Much the same as today's wireless telephony providers don't. I doubt that'll save them. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-for-the-success-of-unix/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-f...
nandemo 10y ago
> I think the question of whether big business should exist is at this point no longer really an open question. Uh, that wasn't never the question, not even in 1911. It was and is about anti-competitive business practices.
digi_owl 10y ago
I would say yes. For anyone tracking the mobile phone market, there was other companies coming up with devices that were damn close to the iPhone but didn't get the traction in the press that Apple products got.

DavidSJ 10y ago

Interestingly, they included the full text of the Supreme Court decision in the article. I guess they could just link to the PDF these days, but would the New York Times have included the full text in the early 90's? Edit: Also of note is the notice of the first "aero-taxi" beginning service in Paris. Edit 2: And reading the article, we see that concern over "activist judges legislating from the bench" is nothing new.

SilasX 10y ago
As recently as 1998, newspapers included the full Starr Report (investigation of the Clinton/Lewsinsky scandal) in their paper edition.
- april1stislame 10y ago
  If anything ever needed the full details that would be the president's blowjobs...

abcampbell 10y ago

This will happen to Google. Sooner than people realize. (From another story on the front page) http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-students-suit-claims-google-scanned-accounts-without-permission/1 http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-st...

beambot 10y ago
Alphabet is already fractionating the various business units into quasi-independent companies. There's a good case to be made that they're already taking measures to mitigate a antitrust-bust.
- baq 10y ago
  is it possible for them to do something to search that would prevent such an outcome? and what does splitting search even mean - the word 'google' appears on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of current age?
  - toast0 10y ago
    The way to avoid an anti trust ruling is probably to voluntarily limit their actions to what would be allowed under a consent decree. That's a bit hard to predict, though. I would be careful about featuring products on top of search results, because that seems to irritate regulators (although all the other search engines do it, and it can be good user experience); also I would be careful about bundling requirements for google play services. If broken up, I would imagine at least three companies would result: Web search, advertising, and everything else.
eloff 10y ago
Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the competition is. I don't see Google doing that. The market is open to competition, and Google is very disruptable, if somehow you think you can do a better job than they do. If another Larry and Sergey came along with a search engine that was significantly better, they'd disrupt Google just as easily as the original Larry and Sergey did to whatever was popular before them (I don't even remember.) Do they have the vast majority of the market share? Yes. But they also have plenty of competitors and there's no lock in for people searching, nor a high pain threshold for people to switch search engines. The reason Google holds such a dominant position is simply that their search results are best. If that weren't the case, I'd switch today, and so would you.

williesleg 10y ago

Everyone has an agenda.

ginko 10y ago

How can the NYT claim copyright on a 1911 news article?

Someone 10y ago
Everybody can claim that copyright; what a court thinks of such a claim is something else. In this case, the copyright claim likely is not on the original paper or its text, but on the site.

ck2 10y ago

I'm stunned by the 1 cent price. That means in 100 years the newstand price went up 250x Can't just be inflation. Must have been competition and abundant advertisers.

chillacy 10y ago
Or trying to squeeze more money out of a smaller readerbase? http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-of-single-copy-sales/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-of... 1 cent in 1913 => 24 cents today http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I'm not sure how much a single issue costs today, but the cheapest you can get NYT for is 75 cents a day: http://daggle.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 http://daggle.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480
- ck2 10y ago
  Newstand price is $2.50 inside and outside NYC for daily and $5 Sunday http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-Hike-50-Cents-3-Dollars-136619908.html http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-Hi...
  - chillacy 10y ago
    Damn, that's... terrible. News is cheap these days with the internet and all, but I guess that just means I have no brand loyalty.
kristianp 10y ago
Newspapers have consolidated over the years, these days there's one per metro area. One reason why Warren Buffett bought part of the Washington Post. "If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station — I'm talking of the past — you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference." http://www.businessinsider.com.au/warren-buffett-good-business-could-be-run-by-idiot-2016-3?r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com.au/warren-buffett-good-busine...

rckclmbr 10y ago

Standard Oil consisted of 5% of the US GDP at the time, and controlled the entire refining process. Google is still pretty far away from that. One thing I find interesting though is that Rockefeller feared Teddy Roosevelt being elected, just like Google fears Bernie Sanders. Bernie and Roosevelt hate big business for the same reasons. Interestingly, the top tech companies think monopoly is good for the same reasons that Rockefeller did -- that they can hyperoptimize the entire process, and the winners are the consumers because of cheaper prices and higher quality. That assumes the business operates in the consumers best interests, however...

sharkjacobs 10y ago
fun trivia: when google was refactored into alphabet they changed their corporate motto from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing"

silentrob 10y ago

This reminds me of a TV mini series a saw on History a few months back - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America As a Canadian I found the history piece fascinating, and something I missed in school.

voodootrucker 10y ago

Given that corporations have now gotten more powerful than the governments that regulate them, I doubt we'll see this happen nowadays (but it desperately needs to happen, to Comcast, Google, etc) Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016 (and pretty much the whole cable lobby, VW scandal, etc)

shrewduser 10y ago
Comcast I get but why Google? and who's etc exactly?

coin 10y ago

Horrible usability on an iPad, just serve me the content without trying to be clever

bbanyc 10y ago

When Exxon (formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil of New York) merged, some wags commented that the old trust was coming back together, and Rockefeller would be proud. It wasn't the whole thing, though - the trust also included Chevron (Standard of California) and a few companies (Sohio, Amoco, Arco) since bought up by BP. And I'm sure I'm missing a few.

msane 10y ago

http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/ http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/ is such a well done site. NYT always knocks it out of the park on web products.

digi_owl 10y ago

I think the term monopoly is a distraction. Shifts the focus too much towards raw sales numbers, where the real issue is how much of a mental presence the company has within the marketplace. Any time a company, or group of companies, are large enough that they can dictate the direction and speed of change, be worried. As they are as likely to not move it at all.

Conky 10y ago

Why not do to google what the government did to the big bell to create all the little bells. All the R&D money would not have been spent if there was only one! Google's Ad platforms are limiting how we are able to see and experience different forms of exchange without without advertising imbedded.