3 ms·

Regulations and oversight? Or anti-trust lawsuits? I have a feeling the only way to disrupt companies this large is with the force of a government busting up th

by moate 8y ago

Regulations and oversight? Or anti-trust lawsuits? I have a feeling the only way to disrupt companies this large is with the force of a government busting up the monopolies. A scrappy start-up will just be pounded into submission and/or bought up.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Regulations where it's clean. But 'net neutrality' for example plays right into the hands of the FANGs. Networks can't make you 'pay per email' thereby allowing more of the surpluses to go to the FANGS. If there is 'network neutrality' - one might wonder if we also need 'search neutrality' i.e. if you're in the search business, you can't look at that data to infer anything about that person to sell them other kinds of services. The Office Suite monopoly seemed overwhelming just 15 years ago, but cloud services just got so much better it seems a lot less relevant these days. I haven't used 'MS Word' in forever. It's probably start time to think about maybe some regulations (specifically with regard to neutrality) in search, but beyond that I don't think there's quite a need to intervene yet.
- moate 8y ago
  Well that's why I'm more in favor of big, ugly "bust them up" type moves and force them to split. It's probably harder now due to globalization but it's still got to be possible right? Amazon (and Alphabet and all that) would be easy enough to carve up into smaller businesses cut off from the large central cash reserves. They would still come together to fund lobbying efforts that benefit all of them, but that's a whole other issue that needs to be addressed separately. It's too bad Trump has made it so obvious that it's personal with Bezos, or he would be in the perfect position to take that sort of action. Obviously if he did that at this point, it would be worse than Nixon's "Enemies List".

3 ms·

Regulations and oversight? Or anti-trust lawsuits? I have a feeling the only way to disrupt companies this large is with the force of a government busting up th

by moate 8y ago

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Regulations where it's clean. But 'net neutrality' for example plays right into the hands of the FANGs. Networks can't make you 'pay per email' thereby allowing more of the surpluses to go to the FANGS. If there is 'network neutrality' - one might wonder if we also need 'search neutrality' i.e. if you're in the search business, you can't look at that data to infer anything about that person to sell them other kinds of services. The Office Suite monopoly seemed overwhelming just 15 years ago, but cloud services just got so much better it seems a lot less relevant these days. I haven't used 'MS Word' in forever. It's probably start time to think about maybe some regulations (specifically with regard to neutrality) in search, but beyond that I don't think there's quite a need to intervene yet.
- moate 8y ago
  Well that's why I'm more in favor of big, ugly "bust them up" type moves and force them to split. It's probably harder now due to globalization but it's still got to be possible right? Amazon (and Alphabet and all that) would be easy enough to carve up into smaller businesses cut off from the large central cash reserves. They would still come together to fund lobbying efforts that benefit all of them, but that's a whole other issue that needs to be addressed separately. It's too bad Trump has made it so obvious that it's personal with Bezos, or he would be in the perfect position to take that sort of action. Obviously if he did that at this point, it would be worse than Nixon's "Enemies List".