5 ms·

I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be

by IBM 9y ago

I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism. [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/antitrust-better-deal https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...

wbl 9y ago
The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?
- shopkins 9y ago
  Google has such a vast amount of data on users that its search really can't be beat right now. If you're fully in the ecosystem with mail, maps, contacts, calendar, smartphone, apps, etc. you're going to get better results -- not to mention switching could mean giving up these integrated products.
  - wbl 9y ago
    So if we break up Google, this harms consumers by stopping the integration.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work between the best services from different companies? We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling them with their good ones.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    I'd say it has too much data and it is already hurting search results. You get tons of unrelated stuff.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago
  The barriers to entry in their fields are huge. - As you mentioned, in anything social, the network effects are immense. - In anything where inputs are fuzzy and machine learning is required, the biggest data corpus wins (language recognition, image recognition, video recognition, translation, self-driving cars, payment fraud detection, etc etc). Open training corpuses won't ever be as extensive or fast to access as the proprietary hoards that the Big 5 US tech giants or the Big 4 Chinese giants have. - Given their value-add in terms of phone OSs+cloud storage+apps+mapping, Apple/Google/Facebook/MS get data that anyone else will never get. 24/7 location updates PLUS your full contact list PLUS most of your photos with pre-tagged content - enables targeting and monetisation of a vast scale and scope. Basically, the antitrust issues are already so huge that I would not be willing to bet on firms outside the Big 5 in any profitable area that touches tech - whether it is self-driving taxis, cord-cutting smart TVs, home automation - and probably also online payments eventually. They will not just eat Uber's lunch and Netflix's and Spotify's, but eventually also that of the cable-cos and of the VISAs and MasterCards -- just like Tencent and Alibaba are demonstrating on the Chinese market.

by IBM 9y ago

wbl 9y ago

The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?

shopkins 9y ago
Google has such a vast amount of data on users that its search really can't be beat right now. If you're fully in the ecosystem with mail, maps, contacts, calendar, smartphone, apps, etc. you're going to get better results -- not to mention switching could mean giving up these integrated products.
- wbl 9y ago
  So if we break up Google, this harms consumers by stopping the integration.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work between the best services from different companies? We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling them with their good ones.
- rimliu 9y ago
  I'd say it has too much data and it is already hurting search results. You get tons of unrelated stuff.
MagnumOpus 9y ago
The barriers to entry in their fields are huge. - As you mentioned, in anything social, the network effects are immense. - In anything where inputs are fuzzy and machine learning is required, the biggest data corpus wins (language recognition, image recognition, video recognition, translation, self-driving cars, payment fraud detection, etc etc). Open training corpuses won't ever be as extensive or fast to access as the proprietary hoards that the Big 5 US tech giants or the Big 4 Chinese giants have. - Given their value-add in terms of phone OSs+cloud storage+apps+mapping, Apple/Google/Facebook/MS get data that anyone else will never get. 24/7 location updates PLUS your full contact list PLUS most of your photos with pre-tagged content - enables targeting and monetisation of a vast scale and scope. Basically, the antitrust issues are already so huge that I would not be willing to bet on firms outside the Big 5 in any profitable area that touches tech - whether it is self-driving taxis, cord-cutting smart TVs, home automation - and probably also online payments eventually. They will not just eat Uber's lunch and Netflix's and Spotify's, but eventually also that of the cable-cos and of the VISAs and MasterCards -- just like Tencent and Alibaba are demonstrating on the Chinese market.