9 ms·

Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness'

122 points by arctux 8y ago

cardamomo 8y ago
The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.
- epberry 8y ago
  Agreed. FAANG has the government over a barrel.
  - porphyrogene 8y ago
    For many the rise of fascism being fostered in and around San Francisco is an impossible contradiction.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Why? In a police state, it’s good to be the police.
      - PavlovsCat 8y ago
        When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point. The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another. Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity. > Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think" It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.
    - goldfeld 8y ago
      Why is it a contradiction if startup culture has always been far-right (through the lens of Europe and South America et al)? It's a notch away from enforcing entrenched privilege with an army, unrest providing any such nudge. Didn't the homeless situation in SF ever tip these people off? Besides, fascism grows by the day everywhere around the world, in rich and intelectualized societies no less (or moreso.) The 60's have called and want their ideals back. The saddest part? People who lived through that are getting beyond old any day now. And when their first-hand reminiscence has gone? It'll fall upon the 80's children and oh! how soon we forget. There are those who'll stand by Stallman, Wozniak and those who'll stand by Jobs, Gates, Bezos or Graham but I'm just being mean-spirited now. Well really, the first three off the latter group look starkly more like your run-of-the-mill fascist if creatively visualized not in the private but in the public sphere, being granted whimsical wishes by an unprincipled society. It all boils down to MIT vs. GPL for us, doesn't it? Hacker, know thyself.
      - Nasrudith 8y ago
        Well economic vs social axises for one. Start up culture is 'move fast and break things' which is more an economic right of minimal regulation and seeing them as obstacles to be worked around. Silicon valley has been pretty anti-authoritarian historically - starting with the Traitorous Eight and continuing to the job hopping. A more authoritarian ethos would be sticking with the company for life instead of leaving because you are pissed off about starting early and wearing a tie. Fascism is 'you have to know somebody or be approved or you get the stick for being troublesome to the ruling parties'. While entrenching power in individuals who could pull up the drawbridge and go more controlled with regulatory capture it would be fair to say it is not start up culture at that point, not as a No True Scottsman sense. This is not a dodge of any hypothetical guilt. The policies and ethos may have lead to that outcome but the phases are very distinct - there is a difference between a family passing on their trade and a caste system even if the first may eventually lead to the later.
      - antidesitter 8y ago
        > startup culture has always been far-right (through the lens of Europe and South America et al) I’m South American, and I’m curious about what you mean by this.
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      I'm not in the CA area, so I honestly have no idea what you mean by saying fascism is rising in SF. Can you explain?
      - hermitdev 8y ago
        I would typify a fascist state as a police state. Despite the vocal and proclaimed anti-fascism, CA is probably the closest to a fascist state in the US. CA has likely more regulations and more regressive regulations than any other state. (For instance, my car is illegal in CA, despite being legal in 49 other states). Either you tow the line, or you are shouted down, labelled and ostracized. Only thing CA is missing from Nazi Germany is the mass execution of the undesirables.
      - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
        Well for starters it's home to the greatest mass surveillance apparatuses in history. Their big data sets coupled with their algorithms used for sorting and targeting people based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, etc. could be used to enable the most powerful fascist dictator in history. It wouldn't be the first time it happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
        tensor 8y ago
        I don't like to blame the tools, but Facebook was used in this way by Trump and the Russians. So there is a current day example. That said, claiming these are "mass surveillance" apparatuses is quite some rhetoric. While they can be used for this, they also have many other users. The were not created to be state surveillance and routinely fight state control of their data. Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used.
        wu-ikkyu 8y ago
        >Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used. So you don't think weapons of mass destruction should be banned?
  - jaggederest 8y ago
    As has been said about other enterprises: > If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. > - J Paul Getty The government wants the data that they provide and the tax revenue their employees provide.
    - trevyn 8y ago
      And the economic prosperity they generate. Paper and typewriters weren’t exactly more productive tools for knowledge work.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        Yes, this is especially important in light of the fact that after the breakup of Standard Oil, oil became unavailable and the entire world transitioned to sustainable sources of energy.
        trevyn 8y ago
        Sorry, I don’t understand the comparison, could you explain?
        jaggederest 8y ago
        They're saying that productivity from computers would not cease with FAANG being broken up any more than oil stopped being produced when Standard Oil was dissolved.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    FAANG is a curious one to bring up as a monopoly and yet it keeps on being repeated. They are large and influential certainly but they all have one thing in common - they are all accessible to anyone with an internet connection. They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less. It may be unhealthily difficult to break into but a monopoly it is not. Compare to the carrier and media conglomerate monopolies which don't receive any rhetorical pushes against them as monopolies. Despite them literally being the only option in many localities - and not even tiny ones either.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      There is almost no real competition among the FAANG companies. Google and Amazon have token hardware efforts. Only Facebook has more than a token social media effort. Apple has been careful to circumscribe its retail presence to its own hardware. The network effects Facebook and Google enjoy are every bit as powerful as carrier barriers to entry. I have way more options for Internet access (two wired, four different cellular providers), than I do connecting with my family over social media. (My family lives all over the world, and I don’t even have phone numbers or email addresses for most of them). I have no choice not to have Google scan my emails, because my family all had gmail addresses. Etc.
      - paulpauper 8y ago
        Same for Microsoft. 40 years later and still no viable competition. as big of a lead now as ever.
    - adventured 8y ago
      > They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less Less. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (should be part of FAANG), Google are not trying to eat Facebook's extraordinarily profitable social monopoly. Google tried, kinda sorta, briefly. Apple raised a pinky for a second, with Ping. They can't and they know they can't, they've all given up on trying. Facebook gets to print $20+ billion per year in monopoly profit from here on out unopposed. Separately, the epic position of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger is almost entirely unopposed by Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, are not trying to eat the Windows-Office monopoly. Google is, kinda sorta. They're certainly not going out of their way to do it, say, by cutting into their $100+ billion in cash to massively subsidize the effort. Most of Google's focus is on mobile. Apple is by far the most successful company on the planet, they're not desperately trying to go after mass market share with the Mac to challenge Windows for the bottom 90% of the market. Apple is fat & happy with where their margins are at in computing, they gave up trying to dethrone the Windows monopoly a very long time ago. Amazon, Apple, Facebook are not trying to eat Google's long duration, extraordinarily profitable search monopoly. Google search is tracking toward $40 billion per year in operating profit, the second greatest product for printing cash on earth next to the iPhone. Amazon throw a shot at it, briefly, and quickly gave up. Apple and Facebook, to whatever extent they ever considered going after mainstream search, haven't done anything there. Only Microsoft took a serious long-term shot at Google search; they're not making a serious effort there any longer, they're maintaining. Microsoft hasn't been desperately trying to take away Google's search monopoly in many years. Not only did they realize they can't, no matter what they spend, they probably like having the monopoly issue to hit Google over. The other companies are also not trying to build their own competitor to Android or YouTube (Facebook has taken a modest shot at YouTube, it isn't scratching them so far), almost entirely leaving both positions unchallenged (Apple has no interest in actually competing with Android in what it does in the market, Android is a required part of what makes the iPhone possible and lucrative, as previously with Windows & Mac; Android phones being the majority are the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone). Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, aren't interested in entering retail to compete with Amazon, essentially at all. They have no interest in those margins. They bat at Amazon's online retail empire at the edges. They're also not desperately trying to distrupt Amazon's publishing empire, ebook monopoly (arguably the least concerning of all the monopoly positions in the group, because digital book sales are declining and independent book stores are thriving). Netflix is part of FAANG, and they're the least powerful of all of the major tech companies. They have no monopoly. Their margin is so bad it's realistically very negative - they're vaporizing incredible sums of cash, borrowing heavily (perhaps dangerously), to try to get to scale before the clock runs out. Their balance sheet gets more dire by the quarter.
- neolefty 8y ago
  Wow, it looks like — even proportionally — the most profitable companies have grown since 1955 (the earliest year I can find ranked lists for). * 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy. * 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy. I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control? [1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/profits/1955/ http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-product https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr... [3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies-2016/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...
  - danielvf 8y ago
    GM was selling cars mostly in the US, while more than 60% of Apple's sales happen outside the US. There's still quite difference, but a little smaller than the raw numbers.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Your comparison is drastically wrong. GM's profit in 1955 was a similar percentage vs US GDP, as what Apple is today. US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000. US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b). [1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...
- stickfigure 8y ago
  What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part? This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.
  - kopo 8y ago
    Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      I'm... kinda bewildered by this. Honest questions: Do you think FB users want to have their like counts hidden or delayed? If yes - what evidence? And if no, are you saying that you want legislation that changes FB to work in a way that neither FB nor its users want? How do you justify that? Do you think noprocrast would change anything about Facebook? Would anyone use it? Can't you just make a chrome extension that does that and see if anyone is interested? For that matter, do you have evidence that a statistically significant part of the HN audience uses noprocrast?
      - skh 8y ago
        There are lots of cases where a significant portion of the populace wants something that is bad or is opposed to something that is good. Government is supposed to look out for the greater good. We can't just say that people want X so we ought to allow it. Similarly we can't just let government ban/endorse whatever it wants. I think it's clear that Facebook on the whole has detrimental effects on society. It does have benefits for people but it has very bad negative consequences for society. Therein is the conundrum. I have no solutions to the problem but also won't discount regulations on Facebook simply because people like certain features.
        8y ago
- profalseidol 8y ago
  Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania. What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.
olivermarks 8y ago
Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.
- srtjstjsj 8y ago
  "populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - twblalock 8y ago
    There's more to it than that. Populists normally portray a situation as a struggle between the people and the elites who control society.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      Doesn't every world leader portray their struggle as a fight between their supporters and their enemies? It almost goes without saying that a politician whose supporters just so happened to be the masses and whose opponents just so happened to be the elites would say that there was a struggle between the masses and the elites...
      - ineedasername 8y ago
        Not every world leader raises it to the level of "they're not just my enemies, they're evil and inhuman"
        geowwy 8y ago
        Not every populist does either.
zaru27 8y ago
It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons. As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.
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yuhong 8y ago
I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.
- mtlevine0 8y ago
  Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?
  - yuhong 8y ago
    I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      > Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse. as opposed to...?
trevyn 8y ago
Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)
imgabe 8y ago
I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things. Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?
- fromMars 8y ago
  Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc. Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.
shmerl 8y ago
It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".
seibelj 8y ago
I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”, and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control. Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.
ilaksh 8y ago
I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be. If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures. Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency. In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).
harigov 8y ago
I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).
masonic 8y ago
I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...

122 points by arctux 8y ago

The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.

epberry 8y ago
Agreed. FAANG has the government over a barrel.
- porphyrogene 8y ago
  For many the rise of fascism being fostered in and around San Francisco is an impossible contradiction.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Why? In a police state, it’s good to be the police.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point. The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another. Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity. > Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think" It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.
  - goldfeld 8y ago
    Why is it a contradiction if startup culture has always been far-right (through the lens of Europe and South America et al)? It's a notch away from enforcing entrenched privilege with an army, unrest providing any such nudge. Didn't the homeless situation in SF ever tip these people off? Besides, fascism grows by the day everywhere around the world, in rich and intelectualized societies no less (or moreso.) The 60's have called and want their ideals back. The saddest part? People who lived through that are getting beyond old any day now. And when their first-hand reminiscence has gone? It'll fall upon the 80's children and oh! how soon we forget. There are those who'll stand by Stallman, Wozniak and those who'll stand by Jobs, Gates, Bezos or Graham but I'm just being mean-spirited now. Well really, the first three off the latter group look starkly more like your run-of-the-mill fascist if creatively visualized not in the private but in the public sphere, being granted whimsical wishes by an unprincipled society. It all boils down to MIT vs. GPL for us, doesn't it? Hacker, know thyself.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      Well economic vs social axises for one. Start up culture is 'move fast and break things' which is more an economic right of minimal regulation and seeing them as obstacles to be worked around. Silicon valley has been pretty anti-authoritarian historically - starting with the Traitorous Eight and continuing to the job hopping. A more authoritarian ethos would be sticking with the company for life instead of leaving because you are pissed off about starting early and wearing a tie. Fascism is 'you have to know somebody or be approved or you get the stick for being troublesome to the ruling parties'. While entrenching power in individuals who could pull up the drawbridge and go more controlled with regulatory capture it would be fair to say it is not start up culture at that point, not as a No True Scottsman sense. This is not a dodge of any hypothetical guilt. The policies and ethos may have lead to that outcome but the phases are very distinct - there is a difference between a family passing on their trade and a caste system even if the first may eventually lead to the later.
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      > startup culture has always been far-right (through the lens of Europe and South America et al) I’m South American, and I’m curious about what you mean by this.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    I'm not in the CA area, so I honestly have no idea what you mean by saying fascism is rising in SF. Can you explain?
    - hermitdev 8y ago
      I would typify a fascist state as a police state. Despite the vocal and proclaimed anti-fascism, CA is probably the closest to a fascist state in the US. CA has likely more regulations and more regressive regulations than any other state. (For instance, my car is illegal in CA, despite being legal in 49 other states). Either you tow the line, or you are shouted down, labelled and ostracized. Only thing CA is missing from Nazi Germany is the mass execution of the undesirables.
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      Well for starters it's home to the greatest mass surveillance apparatuses in history. Their big data sets coupled with their algorithms used for sorting and targeting people based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, etc. could be used to enable the most powerful fascist dictator in history. It wouldn't be the first time it happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
      - tensor 8y ago
        I don't like to blame the tools, but Facebook was used in this way by Trump and the Russians. So there is a current day example. That said, claiming these are "mass surveillance" apparatuses is quite some rhetoric. While they can be used for this, they also have many other users. The were not created to be state surveillance and routinely fight state control of their data. Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used.
        wu-ikkyu 8y ago
        >Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used. So you don't think weapons of mass destruction should be banned?
- jaggederest 8y ago
  As has been said about other enterprises: > If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. > - J Paul Getty The government wants the data that they provide and the tax revenue their employees provide.
  - trevyn 8y ago
    And the economic prosperity they generate. Paper and typewriters weren’t exactly more productive tools for knowledge work.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      Yes, this is especially important in light of the fact that after the breakup of Standard Oil, oil became unavailable and the entire world transitioned to sustainable sources of energy.
      - trevyn 8y ago
        Sorry, I don’t understand the comparison, could you explain?
        jaggederest 8y ago
        They're saying that productivity from computers would not cease with FAANG being broken up any more than oil stopped being produced when Standard Oil was dissolved.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  FAANG is a curious one to bring up as a monopoly and yet it keeps on being repeated. They are large and influential certainly but they all have one thing in common - they are all accessible to anyone with an internet connection. They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less. It may be unhealthily difficult to break into but a monopoly it is not. Compare to the carrier and media conglomerate monopolies which don't receive any rhetorical pushes against them as monopolies. Despite them literally being the only option in many localities - and not even tiny ones either.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    There is almost no real competition among the FAANG companies. Google and Amazon have token hardware efforts. Only Facebook has more than a token social media effort. Apple has been careful to circumscribe its retail presence to its own hardware. The network effects Facebook and Google enjoy are every bit as powerful as carrier barriers to entry. I have way more options for Internet access (two wired, four different cellular providers), than I do connecting with my family over social media. (My family lives all over the world, and I don’t even have phone numbers or email addresses for most of them). I have no choice not to have Google scan my emails, because my family all had gmail addresses. Etc.
    - paulpauper 8y ago
      Same for Microsoft. 40 years later and still no viable competition. as big of a lead now as ever.
  - adventured 8y ago
    > They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less Less. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (should be part of FAANG), Google are not trying to eat Facebook's extraordinarily profitable social monopoly. Google tried, kinda sorta, briefly. Apple raised a pinky for a second, with Ping. They can't and they know they can't, they've all given up on trying. Facebook gets to print $20+ billion per year in monopoly profit from here on out unopposed. Separately, the epic position of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger is almost entirely unopposed by Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, are not trying to eat the Windows-Office monopoly. Google is, kinda sorta. They're certainly not going out of their way to do it, say, by cutting into their $100+ billion in cash to massively subsidize the effort. Most of Google's focus is on mobile. Apple is by far the most successful company on the planet, they're not desperately trying to go after mass market share with the Mac to challenge Windows for the bottom 90% of the market. Apple is fat & happy with where their margins are at in computing, they gave up trying to dethrone the Windows monopoly a very long time ago. Amazon, Apple, Facebook are not trying to eat Google's long duration, extraordinarily profitable search monopoly. Google search is tracking toward $40 billion per year in operating profit, the second greatest product for printing cash on earth next to the iPhone. Amazon throw a shot at it, briefly, and quickly gave up. Apple and Facebook, to whatever extent they ever considered going after mainstream search, haven't done anything there. Only Microsoft took a serious long-term shot at Google search; they're not making a serious effort there any longer, they're maintaining. Microsoft hasn't been desperately trying to take away Google's search monopoly in many years. Not only did they realize they can't, no matter what they spend, they probably like having the monopoly issue to hit Google over. The other companies are also not trying to build their own competitor to Android or YouTube (Facebook has taken a modest shot at YouTube, it isn't scratching them so far), almost entirely leaving both positions unchallenged (Apple has no interest in actually competing with Android in what it does in the market, Android is a required part of what makes the iPhone possible and lucrative, as previously with Windows & Mac; Android phones being the majority are the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone). Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, aren't interested in entering retail to compete with Amazon, essentially at all. They have no interest in those margins. They bat at Amazon's online retail empire at the edges. They're also not desperately trying to distrupt Amazon's publishing empire, ebook monopoly (arguably the least concerning of all the monopoly positions in the group, because digital book sales are declining and independent book stores are thriving). Netflix is part of FAANG, and they're the least powerful of all of the major tech companies. They have no monopoly. Their margin is so bad it's realistically very negative - they're vaporizing incredible sums of cash, borrowing heavily (perhaps dangerously), to try to get to scale before the clock runs out. Their balance sheet gets more dire by the quarter.
neolefty 8y ago
Wow, it looks like — even proportionally — the most profitable companies have grown since 1955 (the earliest year I can find ranked lists for). * 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy. * 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy. I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control? [1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/profits/1955/ http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-product https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr... [3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies-2016/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...
- danielvf 8y ago
  GM was selling cars mostly in the US, while more than 60% of Apple's sales happen outside the US. There's still quite difference, but a little smaller than the raw numbers.
- adventured 8y ago
  Your comparison is drastically wrong. GM's profit in 1955 was a similar percentage vs US GDP, as what Apple is today. US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000. US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b). [1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...
stickfigure 8y ago
What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part? This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.
- kopo 8y ago
  Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    I'm... kinda bewildered by this. Honest questions: Do you think FB users want to have their like counts hidden or delayed? If yes - what evidence? And if no, are you saying that you want legislation that changes FB to work in a way that neither FB nor its users want? How do you justify that? Do you think noprocrast would change anything about Facebook? Would anyone use it? Can't you just make a chrome extension that does that and see if anyone is interested? For that matter, do you have evidence that a statistically significant part of the HN audience uses noprocrast?
    - skh 8y ago
      There are lots of cases where a significant portion of the populace wants something that is bad or is opposed to something that is good. Government is supposed to look out for the greater good. We can't just say that people want X so we ought to allow it. Similarly we can't just let government ban/endorse whatever it wants. I think it's clear that Facebook on the whole has detrimental effects on society. It does have benefits for people but it has very bad negative consequences for society. Therein is the conundrum. I have no solutions to the problem but also won't discount regulations on Facebook simply because people like certain features.
      - 8y ago
profalseidol 8y ago
Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania. What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.

olivermarks 8y ago

Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.

srtjstjsj 8y ago
"populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"
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- twblalock 8y ago
  There's more to it than that. Populists normally portray a situation as a struggle between the people and the elites who control society.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Doesn't every world leader portray their struggle as a fight between their supporters and their enemies? It almost goes without saying that a politician whose supporters just so happened to be the masses and whose opponents just so happened to be the elites would say that there was a struggle between the masses and the elites...
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      Not every world leader raises it to the level of "they're not just my enemies, they're evil and inhuman"
      - geowwy 8y ago
        Not every populist does either.

zaru27 8y ago

It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons. As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.

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yuhong 8y ago

I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.

mtlevine0 8y ago
Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?
- yuhong 8y ago
  I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse. as opposed to...?

trevyn 8y ago

Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)

imgabe 8y ago

I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things. Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?

fromMars 8y ago
Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc. Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.

shmerl 8y ago

It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".

seibelj 8y ago

I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”, and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control. Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.

ilaksh 8y ago

I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be. If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures. Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency. In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).

harigov 8y ago

I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).

masonic 8y ago

I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...