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>If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competito

by wfo 9y ago

>If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs. You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.

msla 9y ago
> Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all? Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.
- wfo 9y ago
  You use a different co-op, naturally. You are conflating two solutions I offered, they are distinct and incompatible. A market but with worker controlled firms OR nationalized search. In one case you pick a different firm exactly like today, in the other you vote or petition the government.
  - msla 9y ago
    But then you're back to square one as far as de facto monopolies go: Everyone cares about that specific co-op, because everyone uses it, so you get the same feedback loop which created Google's dominance. Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.

by wfo 9y ago

msla 9y ago

> Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all? Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.

wfo 9y ago
You use a different co-op, naturally. You are conflating two solutions I offered, they are distinct and incompatible. A market but with worker controlled firms OR nationalized search. In one case you pick a different firm exactly like today, in the other you vote or petition the government.
- msla 9y ago
  But then you're back to square one as far as de facto monopolies go: Everyone cares about that specific co-op, because everyone uses it, so you get the same feedback loop which created Google's dominance. Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.