4 ms·

Yea, its certainly still al ong time, but I wonder why anyone feels the need to try and beat a monmopoly when they are at their best? I don't think the wider co

Yea, its certainly still al ong time, but I wonder why anyone feels the need to try and beat a monmopoly when they are at their best? I don't think the wider consequences of eagerly busting monopolies will be positive.

chillacy 9y ago
Government intervention definitely creates monopolies, like in the case of telecom companies or pharmaceuticals. But it seems many aspects of capitalism lend themselves to winner take all mechanics, resulting in large companies (airliners and telecoms and entertainment companies) constantly merging and reducing competition. So without the FTC, we might have even more monopolies. Without these laws, Microsoft would be the only PC company (MS bailed apple out to keep some "competition" around) and Intel would be the only manufacturer of CPUs (likewise for Intel and AMD).
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  Who can say what would have happenned long term? My assumption is that a true monopoly is not sustainable, but I could be wrong. I don't think the evidence is there that microsoft would remain king for long.
- azernik 9y ago
  Well yeah. This is the "natural" monopoly that Friedman referred to (and dismissed). From the Mother of All Wikis: "Natural monopolies arise where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual or potential competitors; this tends to be the case in industries where fixed costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market, as is the case in water and electricity services. The fixed cost of constructing a competing transmission network is so high, and the marginal cost of transmission for the incumbent so low, that it effectively bars potential competitors from the monopolist's market, acting as an early insurmountable barrier to entry into the market place." There's a good argument to be made here they all software sub-markets are natural monopolies.
fdsfsafasfdas 9y ago
In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses?
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses? No one except Zuckerberg, I'd think. However, it raises an interesting question: how exactly would you break up an entity like facebook? It doesn't seem like a business that would lend itself to subdivision.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Geographically, like a phone network. Then mandate interoperability with an open standard, like a phone network.
    - Chaebixi 9y ago
      > Geographically, like a phone network. I don't think that makes much sense for breaking up something like Facebook. Unlike a phone network, Facebook's service is not rooted in geography. Yes, it's users have homes and geographic locations, but those are just arbitrary account attributes, just like their name or if they like the Denver Broncos. You might as well have one post-breakup company start out with all the A-M accounts and the other the N-Z accounts. If you had to divide up the users between N successor companies, I'd probably be best to do it based on friend-graph connectivity, with mandated interoperability between them. That might make the successors sticky enough to survive.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        There's a high correlation between geography and social graph, while the part of the social graph that gets "cut" will give an incentive to make interoperability work, as people will care about it. So your premise is true(ish), but the conclusion can't be drawn from it (and your comparison falls apart) because we don't need strict dependency on geography, only a (relatively strong) correlation.
jkarneges 9y ago
Facebook may be at their best, but I can still imagine the possibility of a better social networking experience. At the very least, a for-pay service where users (rather than advertisers) are the customers could result in a better product. But we'll never know, since nobody else can reasonably enter the market.

chillacy 9y ago

Government intervention definitely creates monopolies, like in the case of telecom companies or pharmaceuticals. But it seems many aspects of capitalism lend themselves to winner take all mechanics, resulting in large companies (airliners and telecoms and entertainment companies) constantly merging and reducing competition. So without the FTC, we might have even more monopolies. Without these laws, Microsoft would be the only PC company (MS bailed apple out to keep some "competition" around) and Intel would be the only manufacturer of CPUs (likewise for Intel and AMD).

ruleabidinguser 9y ago
Who can say what would have happenned long term? My assumption is that a true monopoly is not sustainable, but I could be wrong. I don't think the evidence is there that microsoft would remain king for long.
azernik 9y ago
Well yeah. This is the "natural" monopoly that Friedman referred to (and dismissed). From the Mother of All Wikis: "Natural monopolies arise where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual or potential competitors; this tends to be the case in industries where fixed costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market, as is the case in water and electricity services. The fixed cost of constructing a competing transmission network is so high, and the marginal cost of transmission for the incumbent so low, that it effectively bars potential competitors from the monopolist's market, acting as an early insurmountable barrier to entry into the market place." There's a good argument to be made here they all software sub-markets are natural monopolies.

fdsfsafasfdas 9y ago

In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses?

Chaebixi 9y ago
> In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses? No one except Zuckerberg, I'd think. However, it raises an interesting question: how exactly would you break up an entity like facebook? It doesn't seem like a business that would lend itself to subdivision.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Geographically, like a phone network. Then mandate interoperability with an open standard, like a phone network.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    > Geographically, like a phone network. I don't think that makes much sense for breaking up something like Facebook. Unlike a phone network, Facebook's service is not rooted in geography. Yes, it's users have homes and geographic locations, but those are just arbitrary account attributes, just like their name or if they like the Denver Broncos. You might as well have one post-breakup company start out with all the A-M accounts and the other the N-Z accounts. If you had to divide up the users between N successor companies, I'd probably be best to do it based on friend-graph connectivity, with mandated interoperability between them. That might make the successors sticky enough to survive.
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      There's a high correlation between geography and social graph, while the part of the social graph that gets "cut" will give an incentive to make interoperability work, as people will care about it. So your premise is true(ish), but the conclusion can't be drawn from it (and your comparison falls apart) because we don't need strict dependency on geography, only a (relatively strong) correlation.

jkarneges 9y ago

Facebook may be at their best, but I can still imagine the possibility of a better social networking experience. At the very least, a for-pay service where users (rather than advertisers) are the customers could result in a better product. But we'll never know, since nobody else can reasonably enter the market.