5 ms·

As a counterpoint: in the 1990s the US government was convinced that Microsoft was an unassailable monopoly dominating all areas of technology. Competition coul

As a counterpoint: in the 1990s the US government was convinced that Microsoft was an unassailable monopoly dominating all areas of technology. Competition could not defeat it; only government action could defeat it. All of the arguments you made in your post, about size and market domination, were made about Microsoft in the late 1990s. The government did not break up Microsoft, but then Google came along, and nobody saw it coming. And Apple became a major player after nearly going out of business in the 90s, and Facebook dominated a market category called "social media" that nobody was thinking about in the late 1990s. It turned out that government action was not necessary, because competition actually did work, and it worked by creating new technologies that nobody expected. I doubt the people who are concerned about market dominance in 2018 know more than the people who were concerned about it in the late 1990s, and they are probably just as wrong.

fzeroracer 8y ago
To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance. Linux might as well not exist outside of software fields and developers. We see them exert that control every now and then too (such as their rampant ads and attempts to control browsers). Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all tend to control different but large spheres of the internet. In those spheres they exert almost ironclad control over everything and we see them slowly creep more and more into our personal lives or gathering our personal data. I'm not sure how to say competition really worked in this case because we've seen new fields pop up followed by complete dominance by one company over that field.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance. I can't think of anyone who would say that who does not work at Microsoft and/or is drunk.
smithmayowa 8y ago
True but then aquihire and aquisition were not that prevalent in the 90s. The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat. What negative effects does that have?
  - bsder 8y ago
    The FAANGs buy a competing company and then just kill it off. Good for the founders and investors, not so good for end users.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    This reduces innovation and competition in markets. We should be thinking about preventing massive companies like Google or Facebook from buying anything and everything that looks interesting.
ergothus 8y ago
Yet ms dominance was beaten only by linux and firefox...open source efforts, not competing companies, and those cracks allowed for google and others to come in. Prior to that you had crap like "ie6 will be the last ie, and we dont see a need for tabs in the browser".
- adventured 8y ago
  Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source. Mozilla was set up by Netscape. It provided Mozilla a drastic headstart over having to do everything from scratch. Firefox only exists due to the Netscape Corporation. It directly came out of the Mozilla Suite, which was originated by Netscape. Webkit was started within and supported by Apple, and then Google. Derived from KHTML of course, it non-the-less had a vast corporate push. Chrome became so successful on the desktop because Google promoted it endlessly on the Google search page among other places (and they still do). It wasn't just open source that beat Microsoft there, it was Google's massive reach. Almost nobody is using Konqueror. The drastic improvement in JavaScript over the last decade was sparked by Google's efforts on V8, which forced everybody else to play catch-up. JavaScript itself of course also came from Netscape.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    > Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source. I don't agree with your timing. My memories of the time were * Browser wars I - Netscape loses, MS rests on its laurels while Netscape releases source code * Years pass * Mozilla has been able to build up the Netscape base into a viable product and starts to really make in-roads against MS * Big corps see success and fund it to avoid MS lock-in * Years pass * Chrome comes along Sure, there was some initial investment in Mozilla, but I sincerely doubt success occurred without relying on a vast number of unfunded volunteer hours. Chrome is cool, but likewise it built on that open source base that you dismiss so lightly. If market success relies on people doing free work, and the dominance is in place for years because no competitor can compete in that market until the unpaid labor can catch up, then the market isn't what's responsible for the success.
- 8y ago
twtw 8y ago
> and it worked by creating new technologies that nobody expected. Where "new technologies nobody expected" means "built new user-friendly products on top of a technology that had been in development for 30 years, funded by the government." First past the post onto the results of a commercialized ARPA research program, and making $10+ million every hour as result. It's not clear what the next government-incubated platform for innovation will be.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Practically, nobody in tech cares that the government did the early heavy lifting for - pretty much - every technology we're using today.
MrTonyD 8y ago
I worked for a direct report of Steve Jobs and later a direct report of Bill Gates. They routinely met in secret to divide up the market and agreed kill each others competitors - as well as divide up the market so they could all get rich. (Ever wonder why Apple had schools or why Apple & Windows networking was always broken or why only the UNIX vendors had working networking? Those were all by agreement, so that each of them could get insanely rich.) So monopoly is real, though it is really what is sometimes called "effective monopoly", which is created by product differentiation and much harder to detect. So forgive me if I consider people who believe in "free market" to be fools. They just haven't seen the things I've seen.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Are you working on a tell-all, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man style? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary dirt that should at least make for a good read
  - MrTonyD 8y ago
    You know, extraordinary claims don't require proof or elaboration. This isn't a court of law. I'm sharing my experiences on a public board. The insistence on legal-style proof seems to be a personality-trait of some people. I worked there. I saw things. If some people can accept an unconfirmed datapoint, and add that to their store of knowledge, then they will be able to make better judgments than if they insist on legal-style proof.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      No, I'm not trying to be legalistic. I'm saying that being in such an interesting position not once but twice must carry some juicy stories, and the world yearns for more gossip about the tech robber barons who created our modern world. Please, for the sake of posterity, write a future NYT bestseller dishing the digital dirt.
  - ABCLAW 8y ago
    Is alleging collusion actually an extraordinary claim? It is a very inexpensive and hard to punish play that produces a ton of value. We literally already CAUGHT these people doing the same in respect of developer salaries and yet you're still incredulous. The people who are caught and litigated against with respect to anti-competitive agreements almost exclusively look like fraud 101 rank amateurs. Do you think only stupid people try to take the free money off the table?
JamisonM 8y ago
Counter-counter point: Apple would probably not exist without an investment by Microsoft essentially forced by the US government. And would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level? Yes, the scenario you seem to be imagining is logically impossible. Microsoft can't just block traffic to random URLs before they emerge as a dominant player somewhere. The course of action only makes any sense if Google has already achieved dominance. Could Microsoft shake a website's existing dominance by blocking web traffic to it at the OS level? Of course not.
  - dnbgfher 8y ago
    Why couldn't Microsoft block URLs before they emerge as a dominant player? All Microsoft would need to do is keep an eye out for potential competition and start blocking them. More than that, if Microsoft was going to that sort of extreme, they could start tracking URLs that their users go to. Anything that starts to get popular would be investigated and blocked if it was a threat.
  - buboard 8y ago
    Windows used to have a little search box in the taskbar. All they needed back then was a better bing.
    - berbec 8y ago
      Windows still has a little search box in the task bar. Clicking "hide" is one of the many steps I take on every PC I install 10 on.
my_first_acct 8y ago
An alternate view of the Microsoft antitrust case, suggesting that government action was necessary, and did have a positive effect: "Some limitations were placed on Microsoft’s behavior, such as a requirement that it share certain programming information with third-party companies. The appropriateness of that remedy is still debated. But what we do know is that the remedy pushed Microsoft to act with more caution, creating an essential opening for a new generation of firms. It might seem like a cruel irony that the immediate beneficiaries of the Microsoft antitrust case — namely, Google, Facebook and Amazon — have now become behemoths themselves." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/microsoft-antitrust-case.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/microsoft-antitru...
apatters 8y ago
Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors. There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s. In both cases the government forced the giant to change its behavior and the industry eventually experienced a new wave of small firms that filled the void, competed, and innovated. Notably in both cases the giant also got off relatively easy in the end (no breakup). And both are successful companies to this day. But they were tied up in court long enough to lose their ability to squelch competitors and dominate new markets. Now you could argue this was not fair to IBM or to Microsoft (in the future, to Google?). In both cases you'd be right. I'd argue you don't have to be fair to the winner especially once he starts playing dirty tricks to keep others down. You be fair to the little guys and you get tough on the big guys, that's the foundation for both a healthy market and a healthy society. You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years). We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors. > There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s. If IBM was really a vertically-integrated, predatory giant, how could Microsoft have been successful? If Microsoft was a vertically integrated, predatory giant, how could Google have been successful? The only sensible answer is that the incumbents were not as powerful as they seemed to be. > You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years And yet Internet Explorer was beaten by Firefox and Chrome. So clearly the market works just fine, otherwise we'd still be stuck with IE. > We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps. Yeah, they will. They will be beaten by new companies that they, and the government, did not see coming. That is my point.
dylan604 8y ago
I have my doubts we will ever see a monopoly broken up again. Mainly I attribute that to the lobbying power of all monopolies. If Company A is getting investigated, it is in the interest of Companies B through Z to not have Company A broken up lest it gives the gov't the idea to come after them next. Also, what's the point of the break up? Look at how AT&T was broken into the Baby Bells. After a number of years, ATT formed from merging all of the Baby Bells back into the same company again (minus the ampersand).
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Well, I think government action against Microsoft was necessary as the next 10-15 years was more dominance. I also think anti-trust investigations are long overdue against Google and perhaps Facebook. It took Google rising to the point of being worthy of an anti-trust investigation for competition to "work" against Microsoft. Of course Microsoft made some big mistakes along the way too, but they remain monopolistic and abusive in their choices for Windows. Hardly indicative that a belief that they are over-dominant was wrong in the 90s, or is wrong now.
blihp 8y ago
You like the price/performance improvements we've seen from Intel in the last couple of years thanks to competition from Ryzen? Thank the govt for that. If there weren't action taken, AMD would have died long ago due to a bunch of things like anti-competitive supplier agreements with PC makers, benchmark cooking, compiler 'enhancements' etc. (see the five years prior to Ryzen to get a small taste of what that future looked like) You like Google search and other Internet sites and services? Had the government not intervened, Microsoft would likely have continued down it's preferred path of using Windows and Internet Explorer as a choke point. This would have prevented companies like Google from ever getting traction to the point where they had the revenue to do anything remotely like what we've seen in the last 10 years. Microsoft would likely have found a way to box Amazon in and extract a fee from them on Windows (i.e. think what Apple does re: getting a cut of sales in its app store, only for all retail sales on Windows machines) and maybe they never would have gotten to a size/scale where they could have gone on to do things like AWS etc. There would have likely been 'problems' with the iPod that people wouldn't have experienced with the Zune, and forget about Microsoft ever letting something like BootCamp happen... Apple's fate would have likely been very different. (and without the success of the iPod it's unlikely that the iPhone/iPad ever would have happened or if they did Microsoft would have likewise found a way to contain it assuming they hadn't already killed/acquired Apple to get them out of the way.) There's a very good reason why you didn't see companies even remotely like FAANG succeeding in the 90's: Intel and Microsoft didn't allow the companies around then to thrive if they became a threat. You can say 'well, all these new companies are on the Web and that's how they succeeded.' The problem is, the Web requires a computer of some sort to connect to it. In the late 90's, Wintel controlled 95% of them or so. I suspect 10 years from now, the next generation will either be saying 'see, there was no need for government action... look at all the competitors those old FAANG companies we have today' or 'no one is able to compete with these FAANG companies... why won't the government do something?'
frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
That a company's monopoly position will eventually be overturned doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about it. Using your criterion for government involvement it would be fine if industries were constantly dominated by a monopoly as long as that monopoly changed hands every 10 years. That's an unsatisfactory outcome for society. The point to antitrust is that there should always be enough competition that consumers shape the market - not firms.

fzeroracer 8y ago

To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance. Linux might as well not exist outside of software fields and developers. We see them exert that control every now and then too (such as their rampant ads and attempts to control browsers). Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all tend to control different but large spheres of the internet. In those spheres they exert almost ironclad control over everything and we see them slowly creep more and more into our personal lives or gathering our personal data. I'm not sure how to say competition really worked in this case because we've seen new fields pop up followed by complete dominance by one company over that field.

twblalock 8y ago
> To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance. I can't think of anyone who would say that who does not work at Microsoft and/or is drunk.

smithmayowa 8y ago

True but then aquihire and aquisition were not that prevalent in the 90s. The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat.

twblalock 8y ago
> The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat. What negative effects does that have?
- bsder 8y ago
  The FAANGs buy a competing company and then just kill it off. Good for the founders and investors, not so good for end users.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  This reduces innovation and competition in markets. We should be thinking about preventing massive companies like Google or Facebook from buying anything and everything that looks interesting.

ergothus 8y ago

Yet ms dominance was beaten only by linux and firefox...open source efforts, not competing companies, and those cracks allowed for google and others to come in. Prior to that you had crap like "ie6 will be the last ie, and we dont see a need for tabs in the browser".

adventured 8y ago
Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source. Mozilla was set up by Netscape. It provided Mozilla a drastic headstart over having to do everything from scratch. Firefox only exists due to the Netscape Corporation. It directly came out of the Mozilla Suite, which was originated by Netscape. Webkit was started within and supported by Apple, and then Google. Derived from KHTML of course, it non-the-less had a vast corporate push. Chrome became so successful on the desktop because Google promoted it endlessly on the Google search page among other places (and they still do). It wasn't just open source that beat Microsoft there, it was Google's massive reach. Almost nobody is using Konqueror. The drastic improvement in JavaScript over the last decade was sparked by Google's efforts on V8, which forced everybody else to play catch-up. JavaScript itself of course also came from Netscape.
- ergothus 8y ago
  > Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source. I don't agree with your timing. My memories of the time were * Browser wars I - Netscape loses, MS rests on its laurels while Netscape releases source code * Years pass * Mozilla has been able to build up the Netscape base into a viable product and starts to really make in-roads against MS * Big corps see success and fund it to avoid MS lock-in * Years pass * Chrome comes along Sure, there was some initial investment in Mozilla, but I sincerely doubt success occurred without relying on a vast number of unfunded volunteer hours. Chrome is cool, but likewise it built on that open source base that you dismiss so lightly. If market success relies on people doing free work, and the dominance is in place for years because no competitor can compete in that market until the unpaid labor can catch up, then the market isn't what's responsible for the success.
8y ago

twtw 8y ago

> and it worked by creating new technologies that nobody expected. Where "new technologies nobody expected" means "built new user-friendly products on top of a technology that had been in development for 30 years, funded by the government." First past the post onto the results of a commercialized ARPA research program, and making $10+ million every hour as result. It's not clear what the next government-incubated platform for innovation will be.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Practically, nobody in tech cares that the government did the early heavy lifting for - pretty much - every technology we're using today.

MrTonyD 8y ago

I worked for a direct report of Steve Jobs and later a direct report of Bill Gates. They routinely met in secret to divide up the market and agreed kill each others competitors - as well as divide up the market so they could all get rich. (Ever wonder why Apple had schools or why Apple & Windows networking was always broken or why only the UNIX vendors had working networking? Those were all by agreement, so that each of them could get insanely rich.) So monopoly is real, though it is really what is sometimes called "effective monopoly", which is created by product differentiation and much harder to detect. So forgive me if I consider people who believe in "free market" to be fools. They just haven't seen the things I've seen.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Are you working on a tell-all, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man style? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary dirt that should at least make for a good read
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  You know, extraordinary claims don't require proof or elaboration. This isn't a court of law. I'm sharing my experiences on a public board. The insistence on legal-style proof seems to be a personality-trait of some people. I worked there. I saw things. If some people can accept an unconfirmed datapoint, and add that to their store of knowledge, then they will be able to make better judgments than if they insist on legal-style proof.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    No, I'm not trying to be legalistic. I'm saying that being in such an interesting position not once but twice must carry some juicy stories, and the world yearns for more gossip about the tech robber barons who created our modern world. Please, for the sake of posterity, write a future NYT bestseller dishing the digital dirt.
- ABCLAW 8y ago
  Is alleging collusion actually an extraordinary claim? It is a very inexpensive and hard to punish play that produces a ton of value. We literally already CAUGHT these people doing the same in respect of developer salaries and yet you're still incredulous. The people who are caught and litigated against with respect to anti-competitive agreements almost exclusively look like fraud 101 rank amateurs. Do you think only stupid people try to take the free money off the table?

JamisonM 8y ago

Counter-counter point: Apple would probably not exist without an investment by Microsoft essentially forced by the US government. And would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level?

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level? Yes, the scenario you seem to be imagining is logically impossible. Microsoft can't just block traffic to random URLs before they emerge as a dominant player somewhere. The course of action only makes any sense if Google has already achieved dominance. Could Microsoft shake a website's existing dominance by blocking web traffic to it at the OS level? Of course not.
- dnbgfher 8y ago
  Why couldn't Microsoft block URLs before they emerge as a dominant player? All Microsoft would need to do is keep an eye out for potential competition and start blocking them. More than that, if Microsoft was going to that sort of extreme, they could start tracking URLs that their users go to. Anything that starts to get popular would be investigated and blocked if it was a threat.
- buboard 8y ago
  Windows used to have a little search box in the taskbar. All they needed back then was a better bing.
  - berbec 8y ago
    Windows still has a little search box in the task bar. Clicking "hide" is one of the many steps I take on every PC I install 10 on.

my_first_acct 8y ago

An alternate view of the Microsoft antitrust case, suggesting that government action was necessary, and did have a positive effect: "Some limitations were placed on Microsoft’s behavior, such as a requirement that it share certain programming information with third-party companies. The appropriateness of that remedy is still debated. But what we do know is that the remedy pushed Microsoft to act with more caution, creating an essential opening for a new generation of firms. It might seem like a cruel irony that the immediate beneficiaries of the Microsoft antitrust case — namely, Google, Facebook and Amazon — have now become behemoths themselves." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/microsoft-antitrust-case.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/microsoft-antitru...

apatters 8y ago

Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors. There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s. In both cases the government forced the giant to change its behavior and the industry eventually experienced a new wave of small firms that filled the void, competed, and innovated. Notably in both cases the giant also got off relatively easy in the end (no breakup). And both are successful companies to this day. But they were tied up in court long enough to lose their ability to squelch competitors and dominate new markets. Now you could argue this was not fair to IBM or to Microsoft (in the future, to Google?). In both cases you'd be right. I'd argue you don't have to be fair to the winner especially once he starts playing dirty tricks to keep others down. You be fair to the little guys and you get tough on the big guys, that's the foundation for both a healthy market and a healthy society. You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years). We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps.

twblalock 8y ago
> Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors. > There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s. If IBM was really a vertically-integrated, predatory giant, how could Microsoft have been successful? If Microsoft was a vertically integrated, predatory giant, how could Google have been successful? The only sensible answer is that the incumbents were not as powerful as they seemed to be. > You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years And yet Internet Explorer was beaten by Firefox and Chrome. So clearly the market works just fine, otherwise we'd still be stuck with IE. > We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps. Yeah, they will. They will be beaten by new companies that they, and the government, did not see coming. That is my point.

dylan604 8y ago

I have my doubts we will ever see a monopoly broken up again. Mainly I attribute that to the lobbying power of all monopolies. If Company A is getting investigated, it is in the interest of Companies B through Z to not have Company A broken up lest it gives the gov't the idea to come after them next. Also, what's the point of the break up? Look at how AT&T was broken into the Baby Bells. After a number of years, ATT formed from merging all of the Baby Bells back into the same company again (minus the ampersand).

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Well, I think government action against Microsoft was necessary as the next 10-15 years was more dominance. I also think anti-trust investigations are long overdue against Google and perhaps Facebook. It took Google rising to the point of being worthy of an anti-trust investigation for competition to "work" against Microsoft. Of course Microsoft made some big mistakes along the way too, but they remain monopolistic and abusive in their choices for Windows. Hardly indicative that a belief that they are over-dominant was wrong in the 90s, or is wrong now.

blihp 8y ago

You like the price/performance improvements we've seen from Intel in the last couple of years thanks to competition from Ryzen? Thank the govt for that. If there weren't action taken, AMD would have died long ago due to a bunch of things like anti-competitive supplier agreements with PC makers, benchmark cooking, compiler 'enhancements' etc. (see the five years prior to Ryzen to get a small taste of what that future looked like) You like Google search and other Internet sites and services? Had the government not intervened, Microsoft would likely have continued down it's preferred path of using Windows and Internet Explorer as a choke point. This would have prevented companies like Google from ever getting traction to the point where they had the revenue to do anything remotely like what we've seen in the last 10 years. Microsoft would likely have found a way to box Amazon in and extract a fee from them on Windows (i.e. think what Apple does re: getting a cut of sales in its app store, only for all retail sales on Windows machines) and maybe they never would have gotten to a size/scale where they could have gone on to do things like AWS etc. There would have likely been 'problems' with the iPod that people wouldn't have experienced with the Zune, and forget about Microsoft ever letting something like BootCamp happen... Apple's fate would have likely been very different. (and without the success of the iPod it's unlikely that the iPhone/iPad ever would have happened or if they did Microsoft would have likewise found a way to contain it assuming they hadn't already killed/acquired Apple to get them out of the way.) There's a very good reason why you didn't see companies even remotely like FAANG succeeding in the 90's: Intel and Microsoft didn't allow the companies around then to thrive if they became a threat. You can say 'well, all these new companies are on the Web and that's how they succeeded.' The problem is, the Web requires a computer of some sort to connect to it. In the late 90's, Wintel controlled 95% of them or so. I suspect 10 years from now, the next generation will either be saying 'see, there was no need for government action... look at all the competitors those old FAANG companies we have today' or 'no one is able to compete with these FAANG companies... why won't the government do something?'

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago

That a company's monopoly position will eventually be overturned doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about it. Using your criterion for government involvement it would be fine if industries were constantly dominated by a monopoly as long as that monopoly changed hands every 10 years. That's an unsatisfactory outcome for society. The point to antitrust is that there should always be enough competition that consumers shape the market - not firms.