3 ms·

Microsoft is the poster-child of abusing market power, and Amazon isn't exactly innocent on that front, either.

• wahern 8y ago
  I do think Amazon is the new Microsoft. With AWS, Amazon figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish the entire open source ecosystem. But AFAIK AWS isn't yet acting anti-competitively. (And neither is Microsoft any longer, for that matter.) I suppose maybe in the book publishing industry there are strong anti-trust concerns. But I don't think this is what people have on their minds. Few in the industry question the consequences of moving to AWS. And most people--techies and non-techies--use and enjoy Google Search, Chrome, and Android without qualms. Nobody is shedding a tear for Bing, Firefox, or Yahoo, and in any event nobody is arguing that Google unfairly muscled them out. It's only when a service or technology implicates social media do people really get fired up, and to a lesser degree the selling of mined personal data. But the fact that people think of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, plus a litany of other tech companies with household recognition, should all be punished betrays their logic. None of this behavior is anti-competitive; it's not destroying markets; it's not transferring wealth. It's one thing to argue personal data aggregation, mining, and selling should be more heavily regulated (a la GDPR). But anti-trust has nothing to do with it, and I don't see how splitting any of these companies up would substantially change anything, let alone result in a net benefit. At least not under the pretense of "fixing" social media, privacy, or fake news.