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Ugh, The Economist. > However, the barriers to entry are rising. Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. It exists to pr
by cletus 9y ago
Ugh, The Economist.
> However, the barriers to entry are rising.
Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. It exists to protect you from unfair practices resulting in market dominance (typically monopolies). There's a difference.
> If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant
Not every surface is a slipper slope.
More to the point, we're now talking about what might happen rather than what is happening?
> Less money will go into startups
Absolutely no evidence of that yet. In fact I'd argue there's still too much sloshing around the tech industry. But that's fine. If "sophisticatd" investors want to lose their collective shirts on pets.com or whatever, go for it.
> The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up.
I've never understood the complaints about Android for two reasons:
1. Consumers have other options (mainly iOS); and
2. Apple isn't held to the same standard. The only reason Google seems to be is that they let third-party manufacturers use their stuff at all. Apple doesn't. So Google gets raked over the anti-competitive coals? WTF?
It's also worth nothing that Android consists of two principal parts:
1. The open source part, which anyone can do anything with (license permitting); and
2. The Google apps and Android trademark, which come with constraints.
Amazon has gone the route of using (1) for their Fire line. Samsung is in camp (2). The point here is you don't have to use (2). People are capable of writing their own apps. Well, let me clarify. They should be but they aren't. Samsung apps in particular are terrible.
That's not Google's fault. That's Samsung's.
> Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away
Isn't this a sign that their alleged market dominance is fragile?
Honestly, this whole piece seems like a giant FUD exercise in "What if..."
- yoz-y 9y ago> Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. Depends on which antitrust you are talking about. European regulators are generally interested in keeping the market competitive. In the US they give bigger priority to effect on the end user. So in US a single monopoly which does not hike prices is fine whereas in the EU it is not. This is also why Google was hit in the US over Android and search (they stifled the competition, while giving arguably better experience to the users) and Apple was hit in the US over e-books (they hiked the prices while having a puny market share). Problem with Android in EU is mostly that without Google services it is not particularly useful as the alternatives are pretty bad. Google Maps has only a few very local competitors for example, DDG local search is pretty terrible and so on.
- brandmeyer 9y ago"Consumers have other options (mainly iOS)" Two or three competitors in a space does not a robust market make. For one thing, it is very easy to create side-channels of collusion between the competitors. Just as one example closer to everyday life, think about how easy it is for two people to share information in bridge or spades (the card games) without overt communication. I guarantee that side-channel collusion is happening between executives any time the number of players has gotten small enough. How many times have regulatory agencies used the existence of only two networking/telecom providers in an area as a basis for deciding that a market has sufficient competition to allow another merger to go through? We can see the adverse effects of the lack of competition in the terrible customer service and product quality in that industry. Why can't we see it in our own?
- dude01 9y agoThere used to be a blog titled "Oligopoly Watch" (looks like it's dead now) where they talked about two or more groups of companies dominating various market segments. So yeah, you can have way more than two companies indirectly colluding to fix prices and competition. I don't know if this is the greatest link, but here's a list of some current oligopolies: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-examples-oligopolies.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-som...