15 ms·

'Break up big tech's monopoly': Smaller rivals join growing chorus

168 points by techslave 7y ago

jayd16 7y ago
Has a break up ever worked historically? The US telecom industry is not a great example of competition. I'd much prefer laws preventing user lock in and lowing the burden of starting a competitor to these companies.
- altoidaltoid 7y ago
  Hmm. Well it is more of a matter of not continuing to pursue and enforce anti-trust after the break-up of Ma Bell. It needs be a program not a one time affair.
- s17n 7y ago
  You might be too young to remember, but phone calls used to cost money. So I think you could say the break up was in fact a success.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Landlines are still expensive. You can easily shop around with cell service though, thanks to public management of the spectrum.
  - chrismcb 7y ago
    They cost money after the breakup. In fact "free" long distance is a fairly new thing.
Despegar 7y ago
This piece starts with Tile and Apple but that isn't going to go anywhere in terms of antitrust. Tile's grievance is just the standard multi-decade grievance of a startup that gets sherlocked by Apple and incorporated into the OS. Unless they have patents that Apple is infringing, there's really no case for them to make. Google on the other hand is a straightforward antitrust case. I think Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp could potentially also be undone. Amazon seems to have been trying to expand the market definition to all of retail or ecommerce, at least in their PR, but an antitrust case against them would likely define the market more narrowly to particular verticals (like book sales).
buboard 7y ago
I can't help but think that companies like basecamp or tile, largely brought about this situation to themselves. Neither google nor apple should be platforms to be dependent on. They should be used as startup platforms, get some momentum and then actively seek to build their own outreach to customers independently. Putting all your money in someone else's bag for years and expecting them not to steal some , is borderline delusional. Rent seeking is a spontaneous behavior of big platforms. HN orthodoxy will suggest otherwise, but i think everyone who depends on corporate owned platforms should start pulling away as soon as they have momentum. Citing the lack of alternatives is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if nobody tries to find an alternative pathway , there just won't be one
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Or, you know, antitrust action. You may have good advice, given the status quo, but why must me accept the status quo. Also, a more likely thing to happen than "pulling away as soon as they have momentum" is "abandon the project far earlier, because investors didn't want to go there so it never got off the ground at all."
  - buboard 7y ago
    Because antitrust action will just distract from trying to actually beat the status quo, without effect (like we havent seen any effects fron eu’s repeated attempts to steer ppl away from google). In the case of basecamp i dont think they need investors to survive and perhaps they can use the google tax money better elsewhere
- johnward 7y ago
  Google has like 80% of the search market share. How does one not become dependent on that traffic source?
  - buboard 7y ago
    How did any of these companies (google amazon apple) grow? Feeding the search machine only makes google stronger. If businesses stop giving away their content to google for free, it will stop being so important. The only platforms that can be trusted are the unowned, decentralised ones, email and www
echelon 7y ago
If the Democrats win the election this year, I think Google and Facebook both stand serious chances of looking at antitrust cases. Google is in the most dire situation. They own search, own the browser and phone walled gardens that bring you there, own all the ads, knee-kick ad blocking attempts, have started taking over content (AMP), have a surveillance panopticon, control standards and neuter challenges to them (HTML5 is less semantic than XHTML), have surveillance devices in the home, embrace-extend-extinguish entire product spaces, kill products people rely on, don't offer support ... Google has its hands in too many pies, actively hurts other industries, and they're creepy af. Facebook might have less of a case against it, but they routinely flaunt Democratic lawmakers, shape public opinion in bad ways, and buy out the competition. Not a strong case, but I think it would be argued from a social good perspective. Apple and Microsoft seem safe. I have no idea about Amazon, since they have competition in all their markets.
- tonystubblebine 7y ago
  Re: support. We let our Android app lapse because their automated tools incorrectly picked up a compliance error. I couldn't figure out a way to escalate that--their support was crazy bad. That led me to look harder at our revenue. Android was 1/10 of the revenue that iOS brings in, with much lower retention, higher support costs, higher rates of credit card disputes. So that pretty much sealed the deal for us--there's no reason to invest in the Google ecosystem.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Good call. I don’t know why people like apps so much when browser are just as good. I don’t download an application to order Chipotles, but somehow it’s necessary on a phone.
- pottertheotter 7y ago
  I'm not very involved in the browser/web standards space, so I just started to realize the stranglehold Google has there. It's terrifying! I was quite involved in the 90's and reminds me of Microsoft with IE, but no one seems to care this time. I've been wondering the last couple days how people can best support Mozilla, aside from simply switching to Firefox. And how to best share the message with others who aren't technical or normally wouldn't care, like my friends and family. I'm willing to put up with some conveniences from not using Chrome, but that might be enough for them to not care.
BurningFrog 7y ago
If the headline at least said "monopolies"...
cwxm 7y ago
I definitely see the argument for why Big Tech's position in the US is arguably too dominant. If we look at the picture globally, Big Tech might be necessary for the western world to prevent the proliferation of China's semi-state-backed tech giants outside of China. Could breaking up big tech in the United States mean ceding position to China's tech giants?
- screye 7y ago
  No, it would be enforcing the same requirements on chinese companies as the US enforces on their own. If they don't then fine them just as much, to have access to the US market. It is not like cheap manufacturing, where the US has to cede ground to China because they simply can't compete. Tech is where the US excels.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    > No, it would be enforcing the same requirements on chinese companies as the US enforces on their own How are they going to do that? > If they don't then fine them just as much, to have access to the US market. That's not the issue, the Chinese tech companies would have more freedom and support for the international market. Access to the US is just one part of that and there are already obstacles to that market. The main point is that the US companies would be hamstringed in a way that China companies would not.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > How are they going to do that? U.S. jurisdiction extends on its territory and across the U.S. dollar. If a Chinese company wants to sell to no American companies and never use dollars, they're free to ignore American law. More pointedly, we've gone through this before. With the USSR. Competitive markets develop better than command-driven ones.
      - reroute1 7y ago
        That's not enforcing the same requirements on Chinese companies. That's one possible effect, but certainly not enforcing the same requirements.
otras 7y ago
> Google allows competitors to purchase ads on Basecamp’s trademark, and then blocks consumers from reaching its site, Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson told Reuters in an interview. Emphasis added. What does "blocks" means in this context?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It means they don't like competition and consider themselves entitled to sue anyone who suggests a generic item for their overpriced brandname - on a computer.
- johnward 7y ago
  I don't think "block" applies here. Yes, the ads will out-rank the organic basescamp result but you can still get to the basecamp website via google search.
- pb7 7y ago
  It means nothing because it’s not true. Basecamp shows up in organic search just like it always has. DHH just has a problem with competition. If a competitor wants to buy ads for a given search, they can do that. Google is not the only one to allow that: see Apple’s App Store and Amazon’s search results.
- nkingsy 7y ago
  Blocks means puts a page of ads first. If I don’t pay to “defend my brand”, my competitors show up first in a search for my trademarked brand name. If I do pay, my registered users will regularly ship money from me to google just by being lazy.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    So by "blocking" they mean, "if I don't buy ands and my competitors do, then people will see my competitors' brands before mine". Isn't this fundamental to how advertisement works?
    - pb7 7y ago
Ozzie_osman 7y ago
Don't break them up. Just don't allow them to act monopolistically.
- Mangalor 7y ago
  That's like asking bees not to sting. Corporations seek monopoly. It's just what they do.
  - dang 7y ago
    You've been posting lots of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. Would you please stop? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nasrudith 7y ago
Really I am sick of the endless hit pieces with definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague from dinosaur companies who don't realize the reason they fell isn't because of some bogeyman but because the problem can be found in the mirror - they are the architects of their own downfall. Translate the subtitle "Smaller rivals join growing chorus ahead of Congress hearing" sensationalist hit piece into reality and you get captain fucking obvious "Rivals: Please hamper our competitors - to grandstanders interested in maintaining lobbyist money shakedown". The Basecamp complaint is nonsensical even in the framework of nonsense of Trademarks. If I announce that I am selling Yamaha Jetskis and have the actual product (not a counterfeit) their job is to shut the hell up.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  > definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague As someone from nearby The Hague, um, what does this mean?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    It was an oblique reference to the trials for travesties and torture. Calling offering and promoting store brands monopolistic abuse for instance. Not an implication that the trials are illegitimate or anything like that.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldpie 7y ago
    "The Hague" is used as shorthand for the ICJ.
m23khan 7y ago
on one side I completely understand the need for healthy market competition in tech industry. However, you have to realize the amount of innovation and products FAANG companies (and Microsoft) have rolled out -- it is unimaginable how we would be able to function equally efficiently both at personal and commercial level. On personal level for example, I use gmail/google search/rely on google to tell me weather and search news and do FX rate conversion, do some unit conversions, etc. I used to own android based phone and it made life simple to have gmail compatible app and the likes. Similarly, I can use amazon for shopping, trying out / learning AWS and even get kindle to read ebooks should I desire. heck, amazon provides entire infrastructure to efficiently deliver my parcels --- better than my Government's mailing program. - Similarly majority of Business world runs mainly on backs of Microsoft (when it comes to corporate tooling and computer OS). - Even take example of Apple -- their products are worldclass and its integration with its own suite of products makes life so much simpler -- iPhone, iWatch, their storage offerings, etc. Now imagine having to utilize products between dozens of companies instead of these giants who you don't know would be able to survive in long run. And those blaming these tech giants for lack of collaboration for a market standard -- sure, that is correct but remember it was much worse to integrate products and services among different vendors back in 1980s and 1990s when you had dozens of medium and large companies.
- 18731xak 7y ago
  Everyone functioned more efficiently before the Internet or Windows for that matter. Travel agents could find flights in DOS applications much faster than nowadays. Life has turned into a gigantic useless digital bureaucracy.
  - chrismcb 7y ago
    Now anyone can find fights, and fairly quickly.
- sshumaker 7y ago
  That’s what people said about AT&T before we broke it up in 1982 - that it would hurt innovation. This was the company that had Bell Labs after all. Instead, we had an absolute revolution in communication technology since - from fax lines, to modems, to cell connections, to the commercial internet. It turns out that innovation happens more often when there is a lot of competition in the market. And the market figures out how to build standards for interop - you don’t need all of the products from the same company to get them to work together.
gettingsnarky 7y ago
People keep calling for breaking up Big Tech, but they refuse to look at ISPs like Comcast and network carriers like AT&T! Those monopolies do more to stifle competition than Big Tech.
deevolution 7y ago
We're essentially living under techno-feudalist system. I don't see breaking up Big Tech's monopoly as fixing this. There needs to be a fundamental shift away from centralized platforms to decentralized p2p platforms. That's the only real way to rebel against the current system of exploitation.
- snarf21 7y ago
  I disagree. We have no decentralized platforms that work at scale. I think breaking up the big companies and unwinding the mergers of the last 5 years would be a huge help. Everything from IG and WhatsApp to Whole Foods to the Comcast, Disney, ATT, Verizon acquisitions should all go back out. The other way to make exploitation harder is to pass some regulations that you aren't allowed to collect data on people and sell it without explicit permission. You must opt-in and you can't be penalized for saying no. People complain about Facebook and Google spying on you and forget that the carriers know where every single person is 24/7. They know (mostly) every website that every single person visits and at what times via DNS lookups. This data is scary and they shouldn't be able to collect it let alone sell it.
bawana 7y ago
Apple is the largest security holding in the portfolios of the members of Congress. It is safe from antitrust.
alpineidyll3 7y ago
Antitrust law in general needs to come out of it's slumber if the us wants to be a dynamic economy. I recommend the book: the myth of capitalism to anyone who wants to get more angry about this subject.
uncle_j 7y ago
This has to be done by the ground up by offering better alternatives rather than trying to tear down these tech companies. Also don't use their services. It is pretty easy to remove most of Google from your life. I don't think Google search is even that much better than the alternatives anymore (I am using Duck Duck Go and they are about the same these days tbh).
- paxys 7y ago
  Competition is not the answer to monopoly, since it the monopoly status which is preventing competition in the first place. This is why antitrust laws exist.
  - pb7 7y ago
    Can anything on the internet really be a monopoly? Can abc.com stop you from visiting xyz.com instead?
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    GP claims there is healthy competition, eg ddg. Therefore I guess by your claim that monopoly blocks competition, there's no monopoly, unless you want to claim DDG actually sucks, which would be an unpopular stance to stake here on hn.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      The claim could perhaps be rephrased as stating there is no (substantial) competition. For instance, Sailfish OS is technically a competitor to iOS/Android, but it is by no means one with any considerable market share.
  - uncle_j 7y ago
    Yes it is. Internet Explorer had something like 95%+ share on all browsing traffic and then someone brought out a better alternatives (Firefox and at the time Chrome). Internet Explorer is no longer dominate. It is now dead.
_tkzm 7y ago
that's like saying that it is time for a dead patient to take his medicine.
6510 7y ago
I had a different idea. In some areas law makers and tech companies would need to write and follow so many vague rules it could be better to have a government agency that does the work for them. It wouldn't be perfect but it would create a different kind of problem that can be compared to the one we are having right now. Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement. Having corporations design their own rules/laws on top of the legal system is costly and undesirable. A proper legal formula would have punishments that scale with the offense. Having government manage authentication could rule out banning people across all services without stating a reason. Accidentally having some back ground music in a youtube video wouldn't have cops rip your mailbox out of the ground or cancel your drivers license. It is that absurd to have google do it. Some processes need some type of private data, if the data is stored on government servers access could be managed on a case by case basis. Likewise, data transferred between google services would have to be routed though gov servers where the request can be compared with the goals. Google could provide a set of adverts to be shown next to email but gmail wouldn't provide a source of information to display adds elsewhere.
- Andrex 7y ago
  "Moderation for example could 'simply' be part of law enforcement." "Having government manage authentication could rule out banning people across all services without stating a reason." These both sound like Very Bad Ideas that could be implemented in short order by the People's Republic of China, building off the existing social credit system, to predictably anti-democratic results. Decoupling authentication from Big Tech is a noble goal, but it should also absolutely be decoupled from Big Gov't as well.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  > Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement. Not in countries with freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution.
  - 6510 7y ago
    Oh LOL, I see now that what I said can be taken to mean the opposite of what I had in mind. I think we have good laws for what goes and doesn't go in public. Much more relaxed than the big platforms terms of service. You already get arrested if you publish the "right" kind of video. I'm simply suggesting we should strip away whatever social engineering facebook and google have in mind. The dumb account termination as a punishment for everything is like revoking peoples citizenship by administrative punishment - in a one size fits all approach. Google's tos literally says they can terminate your account without stating a reason. That is much more dystopian than the Chinese social credit system.
ilaksh 7y ago
Breaking them up is great but you are going to end up back in a similar situation if you can't build large platforms/marketplaces like those companies provided. I think the way to do that without having a conflict of interest is to leverage decentralized technologies to create large public platforms/marketplaces that companies can plug into.
40acres 7y ago
A key point for me in regarding big tech monopoly parts is that some of the biggest companies, when viewed from a potential market cap perspective, are possibly worth less than the sum of it's parts. Facebook has a market-cap of ~630B. Individually you could easily see how an independent Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would be worth more. AWS is probably the most valuable company in the world but is tucked away with the P&L of the various other parts of Amazon.
s17n 7y ago
Basecamp is so full of shit here, they just don't want to have to pay for traffic and it's nothing to do with monopoly (if there were three major search engines, they'd all be selling the Basecamp keyword, because users don't care).
- josephd79 7y ago
  Imagine having to pay 70k plus a month so people searching for your company name do not get redirected to a competitor using your company name to advertise their business. also lets be real there's really one 1 search engine.
  - s17n 7y ago
    Personally I don't have an ethical problem with search being pay to play. Regardless, I'm pretty sure having competition in the search space wouldn't solve the problem (because as I said, users don't care) - what basecamp really wants here is regulation / a stronger interpretation of trademark law.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    It's on Google's users to decide whether or not the re-positioning of results puts Google behind Bing and others. If Apple uses Bing or DuckDuckGo instead of Google, what difference of quality would people see?
  - crakhamster01 7y ago
    *70k per year

168 points by techslave 7y ago

Has a break up ever worked historically? The US telecom industry is not a great example of competition. I'd much prefer laws preventing user lock in and lowing the burden of starting a competitor to these companies.

altoidaltoid 7y ago
Hmm. Well it is more of a matter of not continuing to pursue and enforce anti-trust after the break-up of Ma Bell. It needs be a program not a one time affair.
s17n 7y ago
You might be too young to remember, but phone calls used to cost money. So I think you could say the break up was in fact a success.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Landlines are still expensive. You can easily shop around with cell service though, thanks to public management of the spectrum.
- chrismcb 7y ago
  They cost money after the breakup. In fact "free" long distance is a fairly new thing.

Despegar 7y ago

This piece starts with Tile and Apple but that isn't going to go anywhere in terms of antitrust. Tile's grievance is just the standard multi-decade grievance of a startup that gets sherlocked by Apple and incorporated into the OS. Unless they have patents that Apple is infringing, there's really no case for them to make. Google on the other hand is a straightforward antitrust case. I think Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp could potentially also be undone. Amazon seems to have been trying to expand the market definition to all of retail or ecommerce, at least in their PR, but an antitrust case against them would likely define the market more narrowly to particular verticals (like book sales).

buboard 7y ago

I can't help but think that companies like basecamp or tile, largely brought about this situation to themselves. Neither google nor apple should be platforms to be dependent on. They should be used as startup platforms, get some momentum and then actively seek to build their own outreach to customers independently. Putting all your money in someone else's bag for years and expecting them not to steal some , is borderline delusional. Rent seeking is a spontaneous behavior of big platforms. HN orthodoxy will suggest otherwise, but i think everyone who depends on corporate owned platforms should start pulling away as soon as they have momentum. Citing the lack of alternatives is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if nobody tries to find an alternative pathway , there just won't be one

robbrown451 7y ago
Or, you know, antitrust action. You may have good advice, given the status quo, but why must me accept the status quo. Also, a more likely thing to happen than "pulling away as soon as they have momentum" is "abandon the project far earlier, because investors didn't want to go there so it never got off the ground at all."
- buboard 7y ago
  Because antitrust action will just distract from trying to actually beat the status quo, without effect (like we havent seen any effects fron eu’s repeated attempts to steer ppl away from google). In the case of basecamp i dont think they need investors to survive and perhaps they can use the google tax money better elsewhere
johnward 7y ago
Google has like 80% of the search market share. How does one not become dependent on that traffic source?
- buboard 7y ago
  How did any of these companies (google amazon apple) grow? Feeding the search machine only makes google stronger. If businesses stop giving away their content to google for free, it will stop being so important. The only platforms that can be trusted are the unowned, decentralised ones, email and www

echelon 7y ago

If the Democrats win the election this year, I think Google and Facebook both stand serious chances of looking at antitrust cases. Google is in the most dire situation. They own search, own the browser and phone walled gardens that bring you there, own all the ads, knee-kick ad blocking attempts, have started taking over content (AMP), have a surveillance panopticon, control standards and neuter challenges to them (HTML5 is less semantic than XHTML), have surveillance devices in the home, embrace-extend-extinguish entire product spaces, kill products people rely on, don't offer support ... Google has its hands in too many pies, actively hurts other industries, and they're creepy af. Facebook might have less of a case against it, but they routinely flaunt Democratic lawmakers, shape public opinion in bad ways, and buy out the competition. Not a strong case, but I think it would be argued from a social good perspective. Apple and Microsoft seem safe. I have no idea about Amazon, since they have competition in all their markets.

tonystubblebine 7y ago
Re: support. We let our Android app lapse because their automated tools incorrectly picked up a compliance error. I couldn't figure out a way to escalate that--their support was crazy bad. That led me to look harder at our revenue. Android was 1/10 of the revenue that iOS brings in, with much lower retention, higher support costs, higher rates of credit card disputes. So that pretty much sealed the deal for us--there's no reason to invest in the Google ecosystem.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Good call. I don’t know why people like apps so much when browser are just as good. I don’t download an application to order Chipotles, but somehow it’s necessary on a phone.
pottertheotter 7y ago
I'm not very involved in the browser/web standards space, so I just started to realize the stranglehold Google has there. It's terrifying! I was quite involved in the 90's and reminds me of Microsoft with IE, but no one seems to care this time. I've been wondering the last couple days how people can best support Mozilla, aside from simply switching to Firefox. And how to best share the message with others who aren't technical or normally wouldn't care, like my friends and family. I'm willing to put up with some conveniences from not using Chrome, but that might be enough for them to not care.

BurningFrog 7y ago

If the headline at least said "monopolies"...

cwxm 7y ago

I definitely see the argument for why Big Tech's position in the US is arguably too dominant. If we look at the picture globally, Big Tech might be necessary for the western world to prevent the proliferation of China's semi-state-backed tech giants outside of China. Could breaking up big tech in the United States mean ceding position to China's tech giants?

screye 7y ago
No, it would be enforcing the same requirements on chinese companies as the US enforces on their own. If they don't then fine them just as much, to have access to the US market. It is not like cheap manufacturing, where the US has to cede ground to China because they simply can't compete. Tech is where the US excels.
- reroute1 7y ago
  > No, it would be enforcing the same requirements on chinese companies as the US enforces on their own How are they going to do that? > If they don't then fine them just as much, to have access to the US market. That's not the issue, the Chinese tech companies would have more freedom and support for the international market. Access to the US is just one part of that and there are already obstacles to that market. The main point is that the US companies would be hamstringed in a way that China companies would not.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > How are they going to do that? U.S. jurisdiction extends on its territory and across the U.S. dollar. If a Chinese company wants to sell to no American companies and never use dollars, they're free to ignore American law. More pointedly, we've gone through this before. With the USSR. Competitive markets develop better than command-driven ones.
    - reroute1 7y ago
      That's not enforcing the same requirements on Chinese companies. That's one possible effect, but certainly not enforcing the same requirements.

otras 7y ago

> Google allows competitors to purchase ads on Basecamp’s trademark, and then blocks consumers from reaching its site, Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson told Reuters in an interview. Emphasis added. What does "blocks" means in this context?

Nasrudith 7y ago
It means they don't like competition and consider themselves entitled to sue anyone who suggests a generic item for their overpriced brandname - on a computer.
johnward 7y ago
I don't think "block" applies here. Yes, the ads will out-rank the organic basescamp result but you can still get to the basecamp website via google search.
pb7 7y ago
It means nothing because it’s not true. Basecamp shows up in organic search just like it always has. DHH just has a problem with competition. If a competitor wants to buy ads for a given search, they can do that. Google is not the only one to allow that: see Apple’s App Store and Amazon’s search results.
nkingsy 7y ago
Blocks means puts a page of ads first. If I don’t pay to “defend my brand”, my competitors show up first in a search for my trademarked brand name. If I do pay, my registered users will regularly ship money from me to google just by being lazy.
- manfredo 7y ago
  So by "blocking" they mean, "if I don't buy ands and my competitors do, then people will see my competitors' brands before mine". Isn't this fundamental to how advertisement works?
  - pb7 7y ago

Ozzie_osman 7y ago

Don't break them up. Just don't allow them to act monopolistically.

Mangalor 7y ago
That's like asking bees not to sting. Corporations seek monopoly. It's just what they do.
- dang 7y ago
  You've been posting lots of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. Would you please stop? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nasrudith 7y ago

Really I am sick of the endless hit pieces with definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague from dinosaur companies who don't realize the reason they fell isn't because of some bogeyman but because the problem can be found in the mirror - they are the architects of their own downfall. Translate the subtitle "Smaller rivals join growing chorus ahead of Congress hearing" sensationalist hit piece into reality and you get captain fucking obvious "Rivals: Please hamper our competitors - to grandstanders interested in maintaining lobbyist money shakedown". The Basecamp complaint is nonsensical even in the framework of nonsense of Trademarks. If I announce that I am selling Yamaha Jetskis and have the actual product (not a counterfeit) their job is to shut the hell up.

skrebbel 7y ago
> definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague As someone from nearby The Hague, um, what does this mean?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It was an oblique reference to the trials for travesties and torture. Calling offering and promoting store brands monopolistic abuse for instance. Not an implication that the trials are illegitimate or anything like that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 7y ago
  "The Hague" is used as shorthand for the ICJ.

m23khan 7y ago

on one side I completely understand the need for healthy market competition in tech industry. However, you have to realize the amount of innovation and products FAANG companies (and Microsoft) have rolled out -- it is unimaginable how we would be able to function equally efficiently both at personal and commercial level. On personal level for example, I use gmail/google search/rely on google to tell me weather and search news and do FX rate conversion, do some unit conversions, etc. I used to own android based phone and it made life simple to have gmail compatible app and the likes. Similarly, I can use amazon for shopping, trying out / learning AWS and even get kindle to read ebooks should I desire. heck, amazon provides entire infrastructure to efficiently deliver my parcels --- better than my Government's mailing program. - Similarly majority of Business world runs mainly on backs of Microsoft (when it comes to corporate tooling and computer OS). - Even take example of Apple -- their products are worldclass and its integration with its own suite of products makes life so much simpler -- iPhone, iWatch, their storage offerings, etc. Now imagine having to utilize products between dozens of companies instead of these giants who you don't know would be able to survive in long run. And those blaming these tech giants for lack of collaboration for a market standard -- sure, that is correct but remember it was much worse to integrate products and services among different vendors back in 1980s and 1990s when you had dozens of medium and large companies.

18731xak 7y ago
Everyone functioned more efficiently before the Internet or Windows for that matter. Travel agents could find flights in DOS applications much faster than nowadays. Life has turned into a gigantic useless digital bureaucracy.
- chrismcb 7y ago
  Now anyone can find fights, and fairly quickly.
sshumaker 7y ago
That’s what people said about AT&T before we broke it up in 1982 - that it would hurt innovation. This was the company that had Bell Labs after all. Instead, we had an absolute revolution in communication technology since - from fax lines, to modems, to cell connections, to the commercial internet. It turns out that innovation happens more often when there is a lot of competition in the market. And the market figures out how to build standards for interop - you don’t need all of the products from the same company to get them to work together.

gettingsnarky 7y ago

People keep calling for breaking up Big Tech, but they refuse to look at ISPs like Comcast and network carriers like AT&T! Those monopolies do more to stifle competition than Big Tech.

deevolution 7y ago

We're essentially living under techno-feudalist system. I don't see breaking up Big Tech's monopoly as fixing this. There needs to be a fundamental shift away from centralized platforms to decentralized p2p platforms. That's the only real way to rebel against the current system of exploitation.

snarf21 7y ago
I disagree. We have no decentralized platforms that work at scale. I think breaking up the big companies and unwinding the mergers of the last 5 years would be a huge help. Everything from IG and WhatsApp to Whole Foods to the Comcast, Disney, ATT, Verizon acquisitions should all go back out. The other way to make exploitation harder is to pass some regulations that you aren't allowed to collect data on people and sell it without explicit permission. You must opt-in and you can't be penalized for saying no. People complain about Facebook and Google spying on you and forget that the carriers know where every single person is 24/7. They know (mostly) every website that every single person visits and at what times via DNS lookups. This data is scary and they shouldn't be able to collect it let alone sell it.

bawana 7y ago

Apple is the largest security holding in the portfolios of the members of Congress. It is safe from antitrust.

alpineidyll3 7y ago

Antitrust law in general needs to come out of it's slumber if the us wants to be a dynamic economy. I recommend the book: the myth of capitalism to anyone who wants to get more angry about this subject.

uncle_j 7y ago

This has to be done by the ground up by offering better alternatives rather than trying to tear down these tech companies. Also don't use their services. It is pretty easy to remove most of Google from your life. I don't think Google search is even that much better than the alternatives anymore (I am using Duck Duck Go and they are about the same these days tbh).

paxys 7y ago
Competition is not the answer to monopoly, since it the monopoly status which is preventing competition in the first place. This is why antitrust laws exist.
- pb7 7y ago
  Can anything on the internet really be a monopoly? Can abc.com stop you from visiting xyz.com instead?
- bagacrap 7y ago
  GP claims there is healthy competition, eg ddg. Therefore I guess by your claim that monopoly blocks competition, there's no monopoly, unless you want to claim DDG actually sucks, which would be an unpopular stance to stake here on hn.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    The claim could perhaps be rephrased as stating there is no (substantial) competition. For instance, Sailfish OS is technically a competitor to iOS/Android, but it is by no means one with any considerable market share.
- uncle_j 7y ago
  Yes it is. Internet Explorer had something like 95%+ share on all browsing traffic and then someone brought out a better alternatives (Firefox and at the time Chrome). Internet Explorer is no longer dominate. It is now dead.

_tkzm 7y ago

that's like saying that it is time for a dead patient to take his medicine.

6510 7y ago

I had a different idea. In some areas law makers and tech companies would need to write and follow so many vague rules it could be better to have a government agency that does the work for them. It wouldn't be perfect but it would create a different kind of problem that can be compared to the one we are having right now. Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement. Having corporations design their own rules/laws on top of the legal system is costly and undesirable. A proper legal formula would have punishments that scale with the offense. Having government manage authentication could rule out banning people across all services without stating a reason. Accidentally having some back ground music in a youtube video wouldn't have cops rip your mailbox out of the ground or cancel your drivers license. It is that absurd to have google do it. Some processes need some type of private data, if the data is stored on government servers access could be managed on a case by case basis. Likewise, data transferred between google services would have to be routed though gov servers where the request can be compared with the goals. Google could provide a set of adverts to be shown next to email but gmail wouldn't provide a source of information to display adds elsewhere.

Andrex 7y ago
"Moderation for example could 'simply' be part of law enforcement." "Having government manage authentication could rule out banning people across all services without stating a reason." These both sound like Very Bad Ideas that could be implemented in short order by the People's Republic of China, building off the existing social credit system, to predictably anti-democratic results. Decoupling authentication from Big Tech is a noble goal, but it should also absolutely be decoupled from Big Gov't as well.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
> Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement. Not in countries with freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution.
- 6510 7y ago
  Oh LOL, I see now that what I said can be taken to mean the opposite of what I had in mind. I think we have good laws for what goes and doesn't go in public. Much more relaxed than the big platforms terms of service. You already get arrested if you publish the "right" kind of video. I'm simply suggesting we should strip away whatever social engineering facebook and google have in mind. The dumb account termination as a punishment for everything is like revoking peoples citizenship by administrative punishment - in a one size fits all approach. Google's tos literally says they can terminate your account without stating a reason. That is much more dystopian than the Chinese social credit system.

ilaksh 7y ago

Breaking them up is great but you are going to end up back in a similar situation if you can't build large platforms/marketplaces like those companies provided. I think the way to do that without having a conflict of interest is to leverage decentralized technologies to create large public platforms/marketplaces that companies can plug into.

40acres 7y ago

A key point for me in regarding big tech monopoly parts is that some of the biggest companies, when viewed from a potential market cap perspective, are possibly worth less than the sum of it's parts. Facebook has a market-cap of ~630B. Individually you could easily see how an independent Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would be worth more. AWS is probably the most valuable company in the world but is tucked away with the P&L of the various other parts of Amazon.

s17n 7y ago

Basecamp is so full of shit here, they just don't want to have to pay for traffic and it's nothing to do with monopoly (if there were three major search engines, they'd all be selling the Basecamp keyword, because users don't care).

josephd79 7y ago
Imagine having to pay 70k plus a month so people searching for your company name do not get redirected to a competitor using your company name to advertise their business. also lets be real there's really one 1 search engine.
- s17n 7y ago
  Personally I don't have an ethical problem with search being pay to play. Regardless, I'm pretty sure having competition in the search space wouldn't solve the problem (because as I said, users don't care) - what basecamp really wants here is regulation / a stronger interpretation of trademark law.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  It's on Google's users to decide whether or not the re-positioning of results puts Google behind Bing and others. If Apple uses Bing or DuckDuckGo instead of Google, what difference of quality would people see?
- crakhamster01 7y ago
  *70k per year