8 ms·

The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. The reason markets work is because participants in them are bound to a 'race to the bottom' with ma

The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. The reason markets work is because participants in them are bound to a 'race to the bottom' with many other participants doing the same thing. When companies aren't forced to race to the bottom against each other, the conditions of authoritarianism rise. Authoritarian structures don't have to necessarily come from government - monopolies, oligopolies and implicit cartels are some of the authoritarians of today. The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement?

humanrebar 9y ago
> The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement? At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones. Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.
- euyyn 9y ago
  Microsoft got in trouble for a good deal of illegal things they did to protect the Windows monopoly from Java :) Integrating IE into the OS was fine in itself, but part of the bigger strategy for which they were sentenced.
  - wdn 9y ago
    Microsoft biggest crime was they didn’t spend any money lobbying. Apple doing the same thing Microsoft did and worst, you cannot even change the default, yet no anti-trust on Apple. Different is Apple one of the biggest spender on lobbying.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      You should really read about the MS case, to understand in how many levels Apple isn't "doing the same thing".
- stale2002 9y ago
  Well so, thats because the concept of a vertical "monopoly" makes no sense. A monopoly means that you are the one major player in a certain market. It is in the word. It is definitely possible that a company could have excess market power in a certain SEGMENT of their vertically integrated market, but that is still a horizontal monopoly. Vertical integration isn't a threat to anybody as long as every segment of the market has competitors. For example, maybe facebook has a monopoly on the social network part of their product. And maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use that excess market power for bad purposes.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Right. Semantic points aside, the claim is that non-trivial vertical integration is bad for market capitalism, bad for consumers, and bad for workers.
  - khawkins 9y ago
    It's even worse than a monopoly, it's the elimination of a market. When you perform a vertical merger you no longer have to negotiate with people at that level of the market. The acquired business now only has to respond to the demands of the parent company and it is only through those demands that market forces act on the child business. Furthermore, since the parent company has removed its demand from the market, there is less money moving around. The less competitive businesses who contributed to the market forces keeping prices low end up folding or being vertically integrated into competitors. The market dies and the oligarchy strengthens immensely. Especially so because now startup competitors must have all segments of the market in order to compete.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      I mean, your argument is effectively that vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business. If I was a lawyer, fighting FOR the company, I would literally use your exact same argument as for why vertical integration is a good thing. Reducing costs, and making the market more efficient is a good thing, not a bad thing. Reducing prices is good, not bad.
- nickik 9y ago
  False. The law actually changed because judges noticed that the law as it was in the books was pretty nonsensical and totally arbitrary. It was mostly created, pushed and used by a group of progressive to go after their political opponents. Its well documented (even if people choice not to remember this part) that this was very much PR and protectionism of businesses that were afraid to be driven of the market by the larger more efficient companies. The first anti-trust law in US history for example was quite explicitly passed to restrict the centralised slaughter house industry from driving all the local butchers out of businesses) The new interpretation that has been adopted requires that you can show consumer harm. I actually have credible evidence that people are getting overpriced. > Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. That is very easily said but practically impossible. And even if it is possible, it would be massively harmful because some of the largest changes in the history happened because or were at least massively supported by companies bridging, merging, combining, integrating different markets. In fact what you describe is pretty much called 'Indian Socialism' a form of 'Socialism' that was very in vogue with British elites after WW2 and India served as a nice place to test this since many of the Indian leaders had an English education and agreed with it. They had a sort of 5 year plan that attempted to plan how many companies could be in what market requiring licences to go into or out of different markets. Those licences were of course a perfect tool for the state bureaucracy to get bribes from all business people. > Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean? It would mean government regulator would have to go threw each layer of the software and each application and define adequate rules about what sharing would mean. This is a political insanity specially in a democracy. Now you could argue, that it should all be made by some loosely controlled government bureaucracy like the Fed. An API tzar but how that would end is pretty easy to see. I would agree that it would make sense for government to support and insensitive the adoption of open standard that were created and adopted by people and companies in the market voluntary. If you want to use state power to force companies to support open standards it can not be on a ad-hook bases. You would need to think about a specific general law that could be applied to everybody and that does not involve concrete technologies or companies. That would be pretty hard because I think once such a thing is written most people (at least in here) would oppose it.
- platz 9y ago
  RE: Antitrust - on the right track. Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat. Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.
  - acover 9y ago
    What about a consumer group to assert pressure? Edit: a consumer group could have monopsony powers and be capable of negotiating concessions. Such as an open api.
    - briandear 9y ago
      Consumers already can do that — they can refuse to use FB products — but they don’t. So a consumer group is pretty useless without enough consumers to actually exert their power.
      - owly 9y ago
        This is exactly right. Consumers could organize a week without Facebook event, including deleting the app from their devices. If a significant number of people participated, FB would get the message.
      - acover 9y ago
        Boycotts aren't the only option. Consumers have boycotted products in the past. Consumer pressure has worked against Facebook in the past. I agree that it is an unlikely and difficult solution. I don't see an easy one.
dustingetz 9y ago
Network effects are inherent to networks; you can't regulate away the very thing that makes them valuable to people (well, i dont see how at least)
- folksinger 9y ago
  We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc. And then we take an active role in their management. Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button. Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dustingetz 9y ago
    Sure you can "nationalize" facebook or the world wide web (by like the UN or something?? these are international Earth-scale entities) But there are a lot of tradeoffs there too and some really chilling consequences.
    - solidsnack9000 9y ago
      It might be that nationalising the protocols is enough. A similar situation arises with the public railways in many countries. Most railways are actually private — the big ones in Japan, the German railway, the various Italian railways. In Italy, multiple companies run trains on the same tracks with competing offerings. Most of the major European “national” railways can run their trains on each other’s tracks. TGV can go directly to Milan in Italy, and makes multi-stop trips in Switzerland (Basel and then Zurich after crossing the border). There is a defacto “European railway” that is centrally coordinated but not centrally owned.
    - folksinger 9y ago
IBM 9y ago
The revitalization is happening as we speak. Normally Big Tech would have been able to rely on establishment Democrats and Republicans to avoid antitrust scrutiny. But Democrats are on board with the progressive wing now [1], mainly as a result of seeing the fallout of Google/Facebook/Twitter's role in enabling Russian influence operations in the US (and Europe), but also because newspapers and rivals of Google have been campaigning for it for years (Foundem in the UK and Yelp in the US have been massive thorns in Google's side, as well as the entire FairSearch group). They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2]. The exciting, and refreshing, thing about the revitalization is that's its bipartisan in nature. The Bannon wing of the Republican party are targeting Google/Facebook for the perceived threat to conservative speech and likely because the companies are too liberal, the Warren wing of the Democrats are concerned with concentration in markets. The mainstream of the parties are more open to these arguments than ever before. A Republican attorney general opened an antitrust investigation against Google [3]. That's dangerous water to be in if you're Google or Facebook. [1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-democrats-confront-monopoly/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274 https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-google-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-googl...
- 659087 9y ago
  > They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2]. I wonder why that was. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/ https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
jpalomaki 9y ago
Problem is that too many people are getting most of their information from a single shared source (or small set of shared sources) which is controlled by relatively small set of individuals. This leads to small amount of people controlling the news feed for the majority, which is kind of an issue in democracy. For this particular case we have in hand antitrust policies and forcefully breaking Google and Facebook might be the solution. Same kind of issue however could rise even if there was no money or corporations involved at all. Think for example somebody suddenly purchasing Facebook, removing all ads and just running it as free social media site. The users would be still there and owner of the site controlling what they see. To tackle the problem we should get more creative. One thing that comes to mind is progressive tax on user base (or based on number of people you reach). Making in financially unfeasible to create a platform that covers too large part of the population. I'll skip thinking about the practical problems in implementing this. Ideal decentralized Internet solves this problem as we tear down the walled gardens. But what if people are too happy with the walled gardens. What if we just end up with another information monopoly - this time running in the decentralized network and outside the intervening hands of any government.
ucaetano 9y ago
CPAs have been going down forever in a price war and there has never been so much choice for consumers. There is no evidence of a monopoly anywhere.
fudgepack99 9y ago
>The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. It really isn't because the free market ideology never grasped the full complexity of how our world actually works. It's a false ideology that rulers preach to the masses, see here for a talk on "the free market". Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 I'll give you an example of what happed to PC videogames. Over the last 20 years corporations have taken full control over PC videogame software by a campaign of propaganada and selling games where they fraudulently take advantage of the publics ignorance and irrationality to steal game software by rebranding this software mmo/online. It's a way to cheat the population of owning their own software. Games like Overwatch and world of warcraft and diablo 3 all normalized basically taking freedom away from customers. Markets can't work in a post technological society because corporations have all the power in the relationship to force policies. The human brain never evolved to live in a high tech capitalist society which is why we now have videogame dystopia out in PC game land. In the 90's we had full blown level editors and server executables, post mass high speed internet. Game companies can simply take the software hostage and chain it to a backend server committing fraud on a mass scale. No law or anti trust can prevent this shit since most people are too technology illiterate to comprehend how they are being defrauded.
partycoder 9y ago
Kill Google, Facebook and Amazon and you will have Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba taking their place.
- pravda 9y ago
  Not really sure if that is true, but I would really like to see eBay crushed by Taobao. My message to the Chinese: you give us Taobao, we give you South China Seas. The nine-dashed line. All yours!

humanrebar 9y ago

> The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement? At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones. Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.

euyyn 9y ago
Microsoft got in trouble for a good deal of illegal things they did to protect the Windows monopoly from Java :) Integrating IE into the OS was fine in itself, but part of the bigger strategy for which they were sentenced.
- wdn 9y ago
  Microsoft biggest crime was they didn’t spend any money lobbying. Apple doing the same thing Microsoft did and worst, you cannot even change the default, yet no anti-trust on Apple. Different is Apple one of the biggest spender on lobbying.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    You should really read about the MS case, to understand in how many levels Apple isn't "doing the same thing".
stale2002 9y ago
Well so, thats because the concept of a vertical "monopoly" makes no sense. A monopoly means that you are the one major player in a certain market. It is in the word. It is definitely possible that a company could have excess market power in a certain SEGMENT of their vertically integrated market, but that is still a horizontal monopoly. Vertical integration isn't a threat to anybody as long as every segment of the market has competitors. For example, maybe facebook has a monopoly on the social network part of their product. And maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use that excess market power for bad purposes.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Right. Semantic points aside, the claim is that non-trivial vertical integration is bad for market capitalism, bad for consumers, and bad for workers.
- khawkins 9y ago
  It's even worse than a monopoly, it's the elimination of a market. When you perform a vertical merger you no longer have to negotiate with people at that level of the market. The acquired business now only has to respond to the demands of the parent company and it is only through those demands that market forces act on the child business. Furthermore, since the parent company has removed its demand from the market, there is less money moving around. The less competitive businesses who contributed to the market forces keeping prices low end up folding or being vertically integrated into competitors. The market dies and the oligarchy strengthens immensely. Especially so because now startup competitors must have all segments of the market in order to compete.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    I mean, your argument is effectively that vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business. If I was a lawyer, fighting FOR the company, I would literally use your exact same argument as for why vertical integration is a good thing. Reducing costs, and making the market more efficient is a good thing, not a bad thing. Reducing prices is good, not bad.
nickik 9y ago
False. The law actually changed because judges noticed that the law as it was in the books was pretty nonsensical and totally arbitrary. It was mostly created, pushed and used by a group of progressive to go after their political opponents. Its well documented (even if people choice not to remember this part) that this was very much PR and protectionism of businesses that were afraid to be driven of the market by the larger more efficient companies. The first anti-trust law in US history for example was quite explicitly passed to restrict the centralised slaughter house industry from driving all the local butchers out of businesses) The new interpretation that has been adopted requires that you can show consumer harm. I actually have credible evidence that people are getting overpriced. > Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. That is very easily said but practically impossible. And even if it is possible, it would be massively harmful because some of the largest changes in the history happened because or were at least massively supported by companies bridging, merging, combining, integrating different markets. In fact what you describe is pretty much called 'Indian Socialism' a form of 'Socialism' that was very in vogue with British elites after WW2 and India served as a nice place to test this since many of the Indian leaders had an English education and agreed with it. They had a sort of 5 year plan that attempted to plan how many companies could be in what market requiring licences to go into or out of different markets. Those licences were of course a perfect tool for the state bureaucracy to get bribes from all business people. > Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean? It would mean government regulator would have to go threw each layer of the software and each application and define adequate rules about what sharing would mean. This is a political insanity specially in a democracy. Now you could argue, that it should all be made by some loosely controlled government bureaucracy like the Fed. An API tzar but how that would end is pretty easy to see. I would agree that it would make sense for government to support and insensitive the adoption of open standard that were created and adopted by people and companies in the market voluntary. If you want to use state power to force companies to support open standards it can not be on a ad-hook bases. You would need to think about a specific general law that could be applied to everybody and that does not involve concrete technologies or companies. That would be pretty hard because I think once such a thing is written most people (at least in here) would oppose it.
platz 9y ago
RE: Antitrust - on the right track. Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat. Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.
- acover 9y ago
  What about a consumer group to assert pressure? Edit: a consumer group could have monopsony powers and be capable of negotiating concessions. Such as an open api.
  - briandear 9y ago
    Consumers already can do that — they can refuse to use FB products — but they don’t. So a consumer group is pretty useless without enough consumers to actually exert their power.
    - owly 9y ago
      This is exactly right. Consumers could organize a week without Facebook event, including deleting the app from their devices. If a significant number of people participated, FB would get the message.
    - acover 9y ago
      Boycotts aren't the only option. Consumers have boycotted products in the past. Consumer pressure has worked against Facebook in the past. I agree that it is an unlikely and difficult solution. I don't see an easy one.

dustingetz 9y ago

Network effects are inherent to networks; you can't regulate away the very thing that makes them valuable to people (well, i dont see how at least)

folksinger 9y ago
We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc. And then we take an active role in their management. Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button. Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dustingetz 9y ago
  Sure you can "nationalize" facebook or the world wide web (by like the UN or something?? these are international Earth-scale entities) But there are a lot of tradeoffs there too and some really chilling consequences.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    It might be that nationalising the protocols is enough. A similar situation arises with the public railways in many countries. Most railways are actually private — the big ones in Japan, the German railway, the various Italian railways. In Italy, multiple companies run trains on the same tracks with competing offerings. Most of the major European “national” railways can run their trains on each other’s tracks. TGV can go directly to Milan in Italy, and makes multi-stop trips in Switzerland (Basel and then Zurich after crossing the border). There is a defacto “European railway” that is centrally coordinated but not centrally owned.
  - folksinger 9y ago

IBM 9y ago

The revitalization is happening as we speak. Normally Big Tech would have been able to rely on establishment Democrats and Republicans to avoid antitrust scrutiny. But Democrats are on board with the progressive wing now [1], mainly as a result of seeing the fallout of Google/Facebook/Twitter's role in enabling Russian influence operations in the US (and Europe), but also because newspapers and rivals of Google have been campaigning for it for years (Foundem in the UK and Yelp in the US have been massive thorns in Google's side, as well as the entire FairSearch group). They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2]. The exciting, and refreshing, thing about the revitalization is that's its bipartisan in nature. The Bannon wing of the Republican party are targeting Google/Facebook for the perceived threat to conservative speech and likely because the companies are too liberal, the Warren wing of the Democrats are concerned with concentration in markets. The mainstream of the parties are more open to these arguments than ever before. A Republican attorney general opened an antitrust investigation against Google [3]. That's dangerous water to be in if you're Google or Facebook. [1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-democrats-confront-monopoly/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274 https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-google-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-googl...

659087 9y ago
> They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2]. I wonder why that was. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/ https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

jpalomaki 9y ago

Problem is that too many people are getting most of their information from a single shared source (or small set of shared sources) which is controlled by relatively small set of individuals. This leads to small amount of people controlling the news feed for the majority, which is kind of an issue in democracy. For this particular case we have in hand antitrust policies and forcefully breaking Google and Facebook might be the solution. Same kind of issue however could rise even if there was no money or corporations involved at all. Think for example somebody suddenly purchasing Facebook, removing all ads and just running it as free social media site. The users would be still there and owner of the site controlling what they see. To tackle the problem we should get more creative. One thing that comes to mind is progressive tax on user base (or based on number of people you reach). Making in financially unfeasible to create a platform that covers too large part of the population. I'll skip thinking about the practical problems in implementing this. Ideal decentralized Internet solves this problem as we tear down the walled gardens. But what if people are too happy with the walled gardens. What if we just end up with another information monopoly - this time running in the decentralized network and outside the intervening hands of any government.

ucaetano 9y ago

CPAs have been going down forever in a price war and there has never been so much choice for consumers. There is no evidence of a monopoly anywhere.

fudgepack99 9y ago

>The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. It really isn't because the free market ideology never grasped the full complexity of how our world actually works. It's a false ideology that rulers preach to the masses, see here for a talk on "the free market". Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 I'll give you an example of what happed to PC videogames. Over the last 20 years corporations have taken full control over PC videogame software by a campaign of propaganada and selling games where they fraudulently take advantage of the publics ignorance and irrationality to steal game software by rebranding this software mmo/online. It's a way to cheat the population of owning their own software. Games like Overwatch and world of warcraft and diablo 3 all normalized basically taking freedom away from customers. Markets can't work in a post technological society because corporations have all the power in the relationship to force policies. The human brain never evolved to live in a high tech capitalist society which is why we now have videogame dystopia out in PC game land. In the 90's we had full blown level editors and server executables, post mass high speed internet. Game companies can simply take the software hostage and chain it to a backend server committing fraud on a mass scale. No law or anti trust can prevent this shit since most people are too technology illiterate to comprehend how they are being defrauded.

partycoder 9y ago

Kill Google, Facebook and Amazon and you will have Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba taking their place.

pravda 9y ago
Not really sure if that is true, but I would really like to see eBay crushed by Taobao. My message to the Chinese: you give us Taobao, we give you South China Seas. The nine-dashed line. All yours!