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I didn't impute that the anti-monopoly regulations are necessarily a good thing or a desirable thing. Just that, if you want to stop monopolies, you're overlook

I didn't impute that the anti-monopoly regulations are necessarily a good thing or a desirable thing. Just that, if you want to stop monopolies, you're overlooking one of the most powerful ways that they can get built. Anti-monopoly regulations should be investigating this, but they don't. Whether or not we should have anti-monopoly regulations is a different question (and I don't think monopolies are a moral evil inherently and are if anything essential in some areas to drive innovation) But if you want to fight monopolies, you need to be looking at things like this.

dnh44 7y ago
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in anything so why would anti-trust regulations apply?
- vikramkr 7y ago
  The idea is to prevent monopolies before they happen. If antitrust gets involved in a merger they dont want to let the merger happen and then reverse it, the idea is to prevent the merger from happening in the first place
  - dnh44 7y ago
    Apple isn’t close to having a monopoly in anything. So there isn’t any action that regulators could block which would prevent a monopoly. Also all the markets that Apple are involved in are highly competitive. Computers, mobile phones, tablets, video/music streaming, credit cards, online payments, and headphones are all highly competitive with healthy competition. Additionally when Apple enters a new market they are normally increasing the level of competition not reducing it, and that competition has often changed the face of those industries. If anything Apple increases the health of industries they enter. Anti-trust regulations aren’t there to harm big companies, they are there to promote the health of markets by increasing competitive pressure. I’ll go out on a limb now and speculate that the existence of Apple has made the use of anti-trust regulations less likely or necessary in the markets where it is active in. If Apple had a monopoly in mobile phones and they used that monopoly to try and create a monopoly in headphones then I could understand the call for bringing in the regulators. But the current situation is nowhere near that. You can even buy Bose headphones in Apple stores.
scarface74 7y ago
If the government bands big companies from acquiring smaller companies, what incentives do investors of smaller companies have? If Apple had just copied Dark Skies and not acquired them, who would that have been a win for?

dnh44 7y ago

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in anything so why would anti-trust regulations apply?

vikramkr 7y ago
The idea is to prevent monopolies before they happen. If antitrust gets involved in a merger they dont want to let the merger happen and then reverse it, the idea is to prevent the merger from happening in the first place
- dnh44 7y ago
  Apple isn’t close to having a monopoly in anything. So there isn’t any action that regulators could block which would prevent a monopoly. Also all the markets that Apple are involved in are highly competitive. Computers, mobile phones, tablets, video/music streaming, credit cards, online payments, and headphones are all highly competitive with healthy competition. Additionally when Apple enters a new market they are normally increasing the level of competition not reducing it, and that competition has often changed the face of those industries. If anything Apple increases the health of industries they enter. Anti-trust regulations aren’t there to harm big companies, they are there to promote the health of markets by increasing competitive pressure. I’ll go out on a limb now and speculate that the existence of Apple has made the use of anti-trust regulations less likely or necessary in the markets where it is active in. If Apple had a monopoly in mobile phones and they used that monopoly to try and create a monopoly in headphones then I could understand the call for bringing in the regulators. But the current situation is nowhere near that. You can even buy Bose headphones in Apple stores.

scarface74 7y ago

If the government bands big companies from acquiring smaller companies, what incentives do investors of smaller companies have? If Apple had just copied Dark Skies and not acquired them, who would that have been a win for?