12 ms·

Break Up the Tech Giants? No, Just Level the Field

118 points by mcone 9y ago

m12k 9y ago
The anticompetitive effects of the near-monopolies enjoyed by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon preventing other players from entering their markets, and the anticompetitive effects of them using IP and tax loopholes to pay little or no tax are two different problems. We obviously need to fix the latter, but this article does nothing to address what could even be done about the former.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
amelius 9y ago
Isn't the problem partly the global economy, where the US benefits from having those behemoths within their borders? If the US government would take regulatory measures against those companies, some other government would gladly take their position.
amelius 9y ago
> If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally liable for its content. Yes, and to add to that: Facebook is also a telecommunications company (their WhatsApp provides a messaging and voice platform). As such, they should open their network for competition. And they should not be allowed to harvest private information about users.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same. That's a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at. Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities. However I'm not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn't infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do. I think it's too far a reach politically - they can't even get ISP's classified as utilities. I think the major problem here is that because these companies don't need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn't really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don't have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Does classifying them as utilities simply lock them in? There's no special recognition given to them currently, they are just big business that can get beat by other businesses. If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. Maybe they would have been beaten given a couple decades, but with the above scenario you've simply ensured they'll be around for 80 years and we have to deal with their boring and uninnovative products. My perhaps naive belief is the only thing stopping these companies is outside ambition and will. Is this overthinking the utility thing? It seems so defeatist and reactionary. Oh no, nobody has beaten Facebook after 13 years, it's never gonna happen.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. The government could arguably do two things here: 1. Tell them that they have to comply with common carrier style rules for any infrastructure that is deemed utility like 2. Nationalize the services which are utility like Both are politically hard to do with #2 being arguably impossible in the US. Hell, even the railroads are still privately owned - despite the monopoly hell they went through with Roosevelt. If anything would happen though it would be #1 as it's fairly straight forward like the FCC did with ISPs under Title II - now repealed. Again, politically difficult.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  Hasn't Google Fiber stopped expanding? Many people in America are still stuck with Frontier, Century Link, etc.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    They have, although municipal fiber deploys continue unabated: https://muninetworks.org/communitymap https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
  - lithos 9y ago
    They move a little bit, or pretend to, when an ISP annoys them.
sitoseb 9y ago
Fighting tax evastion is a problem. Monopolies are problem. People alywas want to be free, so we'll always have new ways of doing business without conforming to the opressive system. Regulated business will never stand a chance to the free one. If we can do without brick'n'mortar stores and buy directly it will happen anyway.
exabrial 9y ago
Competition is a wonderful thing. I'm not sure new regulations are needed, I'd rather see existing ones applied where they are applicable.
j_s 9y ago
Competitive advantage/network effect/moat too big? Ask the government to pave over it! Feels almost inevitable to me after phrasing it this way.
folksinger 9y ago
The article mentions nothing of the most important problem we have yet to solve. Who is liable for protecting private data? The way it works right now is that everyone is basically agreeing to publish any information when they use these platforms. If Facebook, Apple or Google leaks this information they are not legally liable. For the ad-based revenue models they couldn't be, their entire business model is selling this information!
curiousgeorgio 9y ago
> Some 45 percent of American adults get news from Facebook. Google's search market share in the U.S. approaches 86 percent. About 43 percent of all online retail sales in the U.S. last year went through Amazon. Why is this a problem? No one forces people to get news from Facebook, search results from Google, or online purchases from Amazon. If any of these companies does or starts doing something that is truly detrimental to consumers, the switching costs are low for all of those products, and there are plenty of competitors ready and able to steal marketshare if they can offer better alternatives. Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when I choose to give them my money (unlike governments who keep power by force). I worry about society being lulled into the enticing-but-false narrative that we need more regulation in every corner of our lives.
- tabeth 9y ago
  > Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when I choose to give them my money So if you live in rural Alabama and only Comcast services your area, because they're a monopoly, and your tech job requires internet what are you to do as an individual? 1) Further the monopoly and buy Comcast internet 2) Decide to not have internet and inevitably lose your job 3) Try to compete, but fail to have the start-up costs as you're a small player.
  - curiousgeorgio 9y ago
    Comcast isn't the problem, but the regulations making it more difficult for competitors to operate in many local markets are a problem. The governments are literally creating the anticompetitive problems you describe.
    - tabeth 9y ago
      That's irrelevant. You said that you don't worry about monopolies. They're clearly a problem, regardless of why they exist.
      - 9y ago
krupan 9y ago
Interesting article. I don't think Facebook or Google set out originally to be newspapers, but the author of this argues that that is essentially what they have become and they should therefore be subject to the same regulations and taxes as all ad-driven media businesses. Makes sense to me. I think we all cheered them when they were using technology to seemingly turn the archaic media company model on it's head (and give us "free" services), but when it came time to pay back investors Google and Facebook quickly adopted the same old model of selling advertising space.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  I think they stumbled into being media companies out of naivety and not understanding, initially anyway, that they had duplicated a media company business model with everything except the content generation. they simply replaced the content generation part of the business model with what was being given to them, for free, on the internet by users and other original content creators. when they dropped their initial naivety and took stock of what their business really was it was sufficiently obvious to them that they were media companies and that selling ad inventory was their business. they now fully embrace being media companies but are able to do so in a way that has, at least so far, evaded the traditional cultural and legal regulatory frameworks that other media companies deal with. I think this era will come to an end rapidly though.
payne92 9y ago
TL;DR The tech monopoly problem is because Silicon Valley has convinced regulators these firms are entirely new things, not subject to existing rules. Google+Facebook+Amazon+Uber+etc should (a) pay their full corporate taxes and (b) be treated like utilities. For example, if Facebook were a media company, they'd be liable for user content. Uber flaunting taxi regulations is a special case (IMHO). Outside of that, be careful what you ask for. In the US, certain utilities are absolutely NOT liable for user content. If you use a cell phone to plan a crime, Verizon is not liable for what is said or written. I do think the emerging tech monopoly is a problem (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), but it's not because of lack of application of old regulations to new use cases. It's because: technology moves quickly, there are strong network effects, and law+regulations have failed to adapt quickly enough.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  I love how people are now all of a sudden defending the "Taxi regulations" as if an artifical monopoly that was serving no one's best interests except for the monopoly was somehow a great thing. It's a lazy argument, especially for HN where old industries with arcane rules are meant to be broken. I guess you don't remember how shitty taxis were pre-Uber, when calling a cab 1 hour before you needed it was required, and you wouldn't know if they would actually come or not. And after waiting 1 hr they didn't come, you would be shit out of luck. Meanwhile, in every city where Uber pops up transportation gets better. Taxi monopolistic laws were meant to be disrupted, and I'm glad Uber has done it.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    I agree but the Uber hate on HN is so strong that no-one will admit the positive impact they've actually had. Would love to see some real counter-arguments though.
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      The positive impact was happening without Uber. There had been a variety of ride sharing programs for several year before Uber started, and the rise of smart phones would soon allow for easy charging people for the service. Uber than devoured the market by using rich guy connections to raise money, and ignoring regulations. And that's what people hate.
sol_remmy 9y ago
Software patents are the real problem here. The tech giants have locked competitors out of using their technology using government patents. Amazon held a patent on "1-click checkout" from 1997-2017. Google has patented ALL of the good web search algorithms. https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over-online-commerce-is-about-to-expire/ https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over... http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for-panda-algorithm-187573 http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for-panda-... We as a society to move past patent regulations, they are artifacts of the industrial revolution and are abused by powerful corporations. Without a team of lawyers, a simple website will be sued out of existance.
- plandis 9y ago
  Agreed. I also don't think that's the fault of any patent holder though. If you're running a business and you have a way to get a legal monopoly why wouldn't you? If you don't there is a chance you competitor will get that patent or one similar enough.
- NickNaraghi 9y ago
  While I agree with you about patents being the problem, I'm not sure that moving past patents entirely is the solution. Can you think of a better way to fairly incentivize and compensate innovators while solving the problem at hand?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I think the main problem with patents is their duration. 20 years is absurdly long for the software space. It may be justified for physical objects since making a hardware patent into a marketable product usually requires more investment and time to get to market (e.g. to design and build a factory producing the product), but in software, a 20-year-old product is usually already on display in some museum. If I had to make a change to software patents right now, I would shorten them to five years. Maybe less.
redm 9y ago
There is not a problem with "tech monopolies." As new tech emerges, new platforms, new ideas, the market WILL be disrupted. For example. 1. Google emerged in a market where there were dominate search engines, such as Alta Vista. 2. Facebook emerged in a market where MySpace was dominating. 3. Facebook is disrupting Google. etc. I firmly believe that the market is ripe and ready always for new ideas and tech. Are you going to be able to build a better search engine than Google? Probably not because it works well. Google will be disrupted in some other way we haven't considered, maybe AI.
- corporateslave3 9y ago
  Yeah, I do believe some type of AI has a decent chance at disrupting google. Their current infrastructure is very good, and is their competitive advantage. But if some algorithm doesnt need that infrastructure, and provides a much better experience than google, they can be dismantled. All tech companies eventually get disrupted.
  - hnaccy 9y ago
    >All tech companies eventually get disrupted. Why do you believe this?
    - corporateslave3 9y ago
      Three reasons: 1.) The inherent mediocrity in large bureaucracies. They always turn mediocre. People inherently form factions within corporations and become politicians. This destroys the old culture and creates adverse incentives. 2.) Technology is always evolving at a massive pace. Old infrastructure in a large company becomes a burden, and stifles innovation. Startups are built to seize opportunities with new technology. 3.) Which tech companies that have historically been dominant since the 80s are still dominant? Intel? IBM? AOL? Yahoo? Microsoft (maybe but still somewhat irrelevant). Apple may be the only company, but they are in a different game.
throw2016 9y ago
There are a largish number of issues converging here. Broadly the naive idea that power and control is used for good needs to be jettisoned. It only seeks its own concentration with negative outcomes for everyone else, and thus requires societal intervention before it becomes a problem. Neither Google or Facebook are innovative. Search is not innovation, for Google efficient, yes. Facebook is timing. The bulk of the hard work in computing is the result of decades of work by academics funded by the public. TCP/IP is the innovation. So market fundamentalists prone to come in when all the hard work is done and see perfect markets everywhere have little ground for complaints about innovation. You can already see abuse of power in Google and Facebook. Zuckerberg's political ambitions will prevent egregious bad behavior for now but that just underlines the potential for abuse. There are other issues too. Lobbying, inability to apply anti-competitive laws - amp is a glaring problem, and the wild west situation with tracking and user data, there needs to be some control and constraints here. You need to create a level playing field where disruption becomes possible and problems can be addressed by market forces before they take the field with them.
- plandis 9y ago
  I honestly don't know how you can say that Facebook and Google are not innovative companies. Googles search beat out lots of other companies. Their search was innovative, their business model was innovative. Facebook convienced millions (billions?) of people to share their information on the internet. That's not innovative? You're effectively saying that the person who has the initial idea is the innovator, not that one that brings it to success. I'd argue that if anything it's the successful implementor that's innovative.
mi100hael 9y ago
Uber's ability to skirt cab regulations in particular has always baffled me. They've always argued that their drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that they merely facilitate the arranging of rides & fare payments. If that's actually the case, then how are the drivers not textbook cabbies? How does a driver using an app to receive requests for rides differ at all from a driver using a phone dispatcher to receive requests for rides? I can't think of any difference that should exempt Uber drivers from submitting to the same regulations as regular cabbies other than the argument that existing regulations are obnoxiously burdensome and often protectionist.
- dantheman 9y ago
  Taxis are allowed to pick up people that are hailing them on the street. Uber works much a like a private car company does - you call them and they send a car. So it is different than a taxi. The difference between uber and a private car company is that uber can respond as fast as a taxi.
wuch 9y ago
> If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally liable for its content, and it will be forced to keep better track of fraudulent anonymous usage, like U.S. political ads placed by foreign customers. What is exactly fraudulent about U.S. political ads placed by foreign customers?
- majewsky 9y ago
  The weirder part of this statement is that they count "political ads [being] placed by foreign customers" as "anonymous usage". If it's anonymous, how do they know they were foreign?
spacemanmatt 9y ago
Good old-fashioned anti-trust enforcement would make me so happy, right now.
darawk 9y ago
Utilities: - Comcast - Verizon - Time warner cable - Power and water companies Tech giants: - Google - Facebook - Microsoft Do you want your tech companies to be more like your utilities, or your utilities to be more like your tech companies? Personally, i'd very much prefer the latter. Tech companies have monopolies granted by superior user experiences. They are deeply afraid of losing that superiority. Utility companies have government granted monopolies - they fear only changing regulation. Companies align with their incentives. If they do not, they will be replaced by those that do. I'm much more comfortable with a company who's monopoly rests on the back of my happiness, personally.

118 points by mcone 9y ago

m12k 9y ago

The anticompetitive effects of the near-monopolies enjoyed by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon preventing other players from entering their markets, and the anticompetitive effects of them using IP and tax loopholes to pay little or no tax are two different problems. We obviously need to fix the latter, but this article does nothing to address what could even be done about the former.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

amelius 9y ago

Isn't the problem partly the global economy, where the US benefits from having those behemoths within their borders? If the US government would take regulatory measures against those companies, some other government would gladly take their position.

amelius 9y ago

> If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally liable for its content. Yes, and to add to that: Facebook is also a telecommunications company (their WhatsApp provides a messaging and voice platform). As such, they should open their network for competition. And they should not be allowed to harvest private information about users.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same. That's a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at. Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities. However I'm not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn't infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do. I think it's too far a reach politically - they can't even get ISP's classified as utilities. I think the major problem here is that because these companies don't need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn't really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don't have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Does classifying them as utilities simply lock them in? There's no special recognition given to them currently, they are just big business that can get beat by other businesses. If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. Maybe they would have been beaten given a couple decades, but with the above scenario you've simply ensured they'll be around for 80 years and we have to deal with their boring and uninnovative products. My perhaps naive belief is the only thing stopping these companies is outside ambition and will. Is this overthinking the utility thing? It seems so defeatist and reactionary. Oh no, nobody has beaten Facebook after 13 years, it's never gonna happen.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. The government could arguably do two things here: 1. Tell them that they have to comply with common carrier style rules for any infrastructure that is deemed utility like 2. Nationalize the services which are utility like Both are politically hard to do with #2 being arguably impossible in the US. Hell, even the railroads are still privately owned - despite the monopoly hell they went through with Roosevelt. If anything would happen though it would be #1 as it's fairly straight forward like the FCC did with ISPs under Title II - now repealed. Again, politically difficult.
PaulHoule 9y ago
Hasn't Google Fiber stopped expanding? Many people in America are still stuck with Frontier, Century Link, etc.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  They have, although municipal fiber deploys continue unabated: https://muninetworks.org/communitymap https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
- lithos 9y ago
  They move a little bit, or pretend to, when an ISP annoys them.

sitoseb 9y ago

Fighting tax evastion is a problem. Monopolies are problem. People alywas want to be free, so we'll always have new ways of doing business without conforming to the opressive system. Regulated business will never stand a chance to the free one. If we can do without brick'n'mortar stores and buy directly it will happen anyway.

exabrial 9y ago

Competition is a wonderful thing. I'm not sure new regulations are needed, I'd rather see existing ones applied where they are applicable.

j_s 9y ago

Competitive advantage/network effect/moat too big? Ask the government to pave over it! Feels almost inevitable to me after phrasing it this way.

folksinger 9y ago

The article mentions nothing of the most important problem we have yet to solve. Who is liable for protecting private data? The way it works right now is that everyone is basically agreeing to publish any information when they use these platforms. If Facebook, Apple or Google leaks this information they are not legally liable. For the ad-based revenue models they couldn't be, their entire business model is selling this information!

curiousgeorgio 9y ago

> Some 45 percent of American adults get news from Facebook. Google's search market share in the U.S. approaches 86 percent. About 43 percent of all online retail sales in the U.S. last year went through Amazon. Why is this a problem? No one forces people to get news from Facebook, search results from Google, or online purchases from Amazon. If any of these companies does or starts doing something that is truly detrimental to consumers, the switching costs are low for all of those products, and there are plenty of competitors ready and able to steal marketshare if they can offer better alternatives. Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when I choose to give them my money (unlike governments who keep power by force). I worry about society being lulled into the enticing-but-false narrative that we need more regulation in every corner of our lives.

tabeth 9y ago
> Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when I choose to give them my money So if you live in rural Alabama and only Comcast services your area, because they're a monopoly, and your tech job requires internet what are you to do as an individual? 1) Further the monopoly and buy Comcast internet 2) Decide to not have internet and inevitably lose your job 3) Try to compete, but fail to have the start-up costs as you're a small player.
- curiousgeorgio 9y ago
  Comcast isn't the problem, but the regulations making it more difficult for competitors to operate in many local markets are a problem. The governments are literally creating the anticompetitive problems you describe.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    That's irrelevant. You said that you don't worry about monopolies. They're clearly a problem, regardless of why they exist.
    - 9y ago

krupan 9y ago

Interesting article. I don't think Facebook or Google set out originally to be newspapers, but the author of this argues that that is essentially what they have become and they should therefore be subject to the same regulations and taxes as all ad-driven media businesses. Makes sense to me. I think we all cheered them when they were using technology to seemingly turn the archaic media company model on it's head (and give us "free" services), but when it came time to pay back investors Google and Facebook quickly adopted the same old model of selling advertising space.

metaphorm 9y ago
I think they stumbled into being media companies out of naivety and not understanding, initially anyway, that they had duplicated a media company business model with everything except the content generation. they simply replaced the content generation part of the business model with what was being given to them, for free, on the internet by users and other original content creators. when they dropped their initial naivety and took stock of what their business really was it was sufficiently obvious to them that they were media companies and that selling ad inventory was their business. they now fully embrace being media companies but are able to do so in a way that has, at least so far, evaded the traditional cultural and legal regulatory frameworks that other media companies deal with. I think this era will come to an end rapidly though.

payne92 9y ago

TL;DR The tech monopoly problem is because Silicon Valley has convinced regulators these firms are entirely new things, not subject to existing rules. Google+Facebook+Amazon+Uber+etc should (a) pay their full corporate taxes and (b) be treated like utilities. For example, if Facebook were a media company, they'd be liable for user content. Uber flaunting taxi regulations is a special case (IMHO). Outside of that, be careful what you ask for. In the US, certain utilities are absolutely NOT liable for user content. If you use a cell phone to plan a crime, Verizon is not liable for what is said or written. I do think the emerging tech monopoly is a problem (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), but it's not because of lack of application of old regulations to new use cases. It's because: technology moves quickly, there are strong network effects, and law+regulations have failed to adapt quickly enough.

pfarnsworth 9y ago
I love how people are now all of a sudden defending the "Taxi regulations" as if an artifical monopoly that was serving no one's best interests except for the monopoly was somehow a great thing. It's a lazy argument, especially for HN where old industries with arcane rules are meant to be broken. I guess you don't remember how shitty taxis were pre-Uber, when calling a cab 1 hour before you needed it was required, and you wouldn't know if they would actually come or not. And after waiting 1 hr they didn't come, you would be shit out of luck. Meanwhile, in every city where Uber pops up transportation gets better. Taxi monopolistic laws were meant to be disrupted, and I'm glad Uber has done it.
- Kiro 9y ago
  I agree but the Uber hate on HN is so strong that no-one will admit the positive impact they've actually had. Would love to see some real counter-arguments though.
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    The positive impact was happening without Uber. There had been a variety of ride sharing programs for several year before Uber started, and the rise of smart phones would soon allow for easy charging people for the service. Uber than devoured the market by using rich guy connections to raise money, and ignoring regulations. And that's what people hate.

sol_remmy 9y ago

Software patents are the real problem here. The tech giants have locked competitors out of using their technology using government patents. Amazon held a patent on "1-click checkout" from 1997-2017. Google has patented ALL of the good web search algorithms. https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over-online-commerce-is-about-to-expire/ https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over... http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for-panda-algorithm-187573 http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for-panda-... We as a society to move past patent regulations, they are artifacts of the industrial revolution and are abused by powerful corporations. Without a team of lawyers, a simple website will be sued out of existance.

plandis 9y ago
Agreed. I also don't think that's the fault of any patent holder though. If you're running a business and you have a way to get a legal monopoly why wouldn't you? If you don't there is a chance you competitor will get that patent or one similar enough.
NickNaraghi 9y ago
While I agree with you about patents being the problem, I'm not sure that moving past patents entirely is the solution. Can you think of a better way to fairly incentivize and compensate innovators while solving the problem at hand?
- majewsky 9y ago
  I think the main problem with patents is their duration. 20 years is absurdly long for the software space. It may be justified for physical objects since making a hardware patent into a marketable product usually requires more investment and time to get to market (e.g. to design and build a factory producing the product), but in software, a 20-year-old product is usually already on display in some museum. If I had to make a change to software patents right now, I would shorten them to five years. Maybe less.

redm 9y ago

There is not a problem with "tech monopolies." As new tech emerges, new platforms, new ideas, the market WILL be disrupted. For example. 1. Google emerged in a market where there were dominate search engines, such as Alta Vista. 2. Facebook emerged in a market where MySpace was dominating. 3. Facebook is disrupting Google. etc. I firmly believe that the market is ripe and ready always for new ideas and tech. Are you going to be able to build a better search engine than Google? Probably not because it works well. Google will be disrupted in some other way we haven't considered, maybe AI.

corporateslave3 9y ago
Yeah, I do believe some type of AI has a decent chance at disrupting google. Their current infrastructure is very good, and is their competitive advantage. But if some algorithm doesnt need that infrastructure, and provides a much better experience than google, they can be dismantled. All tech companies eventually get disrupted.
- hnaccy 9y ago
  >All tech companies eventually get disrupted. Why do you believe this?
  - corporateslave3 9y ago
    Three reasons: 1.) The inherent mediocrity in large bureaucracies. They always turn mediocre. People inherently form factions within corporations and become politicians. This destroys the old culture and creates adverse incentives. 2.) Technology is always evolving at a massive pace. Old infrastructure in a large company becomes a burden, and stifles innovation. Startups are built to seize opportunities with new technology. 3.) Which tech companies that have historically been dominant since the 80s are still dominant? Intel? IBM? AOL? Yahoo? Microsoft (maybe but still somewhat irrelevant). Apple may be the only company, but they are in a different game.

throw2016 9y ago

There are a largish number of issues converging here. Broadly the naive idea that power and control is used for good needs to be jettisoned. It only seeks its own concentration with negative outcomes for everyone else, and thus requires societal intervention before it becomes a problem. Neither Google or Facebook are innovative. Search is not innovation, for Google efficient, yes. Facebook is timing. The bulk of the hard work in computing is the result of decades of work by academics funded by the public. TCP/IP is the innovation. So market fundamentalists prone to come in when all the hard work is done and see perfect markets everywhere have little ground for complaints about innovation. You can already see abuse of power in Google and Facebook. Zuckerberg's political ambitions will prevent egregious bad behavior for now but that just underlines the potential for abuse. There are other issues too. Lobbying, inability to apply anti-competitive laws - amp is a glaring problem, and the wild west situation with tracking and user data, there needs to be some control and constraints here. You need to create a level playing field where disruption becomes possible and problems can be addressed by market forces before they take the field with them.

plandis 9y ago
I honestly don't know how you can say that Facebook and Google are not innovative companies. Googles search beat out lots of other companies. Their search was innovative, their business model was innovative. Facebook convienced millions (billions?) of people to share their information on the internet. That's not innovative? You're effectively saying that the person who has the initial idea is the innovator, not that one that brings it to success. I'd argue that if anything it's the successful implementor that's innovative.

mi100hael 9y ago

Uber's ability to skirt cab regulations in particular has always baffled me. They've always argued that their drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that they merely facilitate the arranging of rides & fare payments. If that's actually the case, then how are the drivers not textbook cabbies? How does a driver using an app to receive requests for rides differ at all from a driver using a phone dispatcher to receive requests for rides? I can't think of any difference that should exempt Uber drivers from submitting to the same regulations as regular cabbies other than the argument that existing regulations are obnoxiously burdensome and often protectionist.

dantheman 9y ago
Taxis are allowed to pick up people that are hailing them on the street. Uber works much a like a private car company does - you call them and they send a car. So it is different than a taxi. The difference between uber and a private car company is that uber can respond as fast as a taxi.

wuch 9y ago

> If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally liable for its content, and it will be forced to keep better track of fraudulent anonymous usage, like U.S. political ads placed by foreign customers. What is exactly fraudulent about U.S. political ads placed by foreign customers?

majewsky 9y ago
The weirder part of this statement is that they count "political ads [being] placed by foreign customers" as "anonymous usage". If it's anonymous, how do they know they were foreign?

spacemanmatt 9y ago

Good old-fashioned anti-trust enforcement would make me so happy, right now.

darawk 9y ago

Utilities: - Comcast - Verizon - Time warner cable - Power and water companies Tech giants: - Google - Facebook - Microsoft Do you want your tech companies to be more like your utilities, or your utilities to be more like your tech companies? Personally, i'd very much prefer the latter. Tech companies have monopolies granted by superior user experiences. They are deeply afraid of losing that superiority. Utility companies have government granted monopolies - they fear only changing regulation. Companies align with their incentives. If they do not, they will be replaced by those that do. I'm much more comfortable with a company who's monopoly rests on the back of my happiness, personally.