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It's important to note that there are a handful of negative externalities created by market dominance. Even if it's not anticompetitive, it still creates syste
by xapata 6y ago
It's important to note that there are a handful of negative externalities created by market dominance. Even if it's not anticompetitive, it still creates systemic risk. The blast radius of an AWS outage is quite large. The tax should be proportional to the systemic risk created.
This holds for tariffs as well. If we are overly reliant on imported facemasks, we should tax them to subsidize a small amount of domestic production in case of catastrophe.
- latch 6y agoAWS is a poor example because they aren't remotely close to having the market dominance of Google. They are more like McDonalds: a huge fish in an ocean. AWS is huge in a segment (cloud) of the industry, but that segment represents a very small % of the overall industry.
- xapata 6y agoBoth AWS and McDonald's are good examples, because we should have a policy that applies at all levels of dominance with no discontinuities. Just as in programming, special cases are (legal) code smells. If the policy can't cleanly handle industry segmentation, it's probably going to fail.
- runeks 6y ago> The blast radius of an AWS outage is quite large. The tax should be proportional to the systemic risk created. I disagree. If in a certain industry we cannot accept the risk incurred by being reliant on AWS we should legislate against that by requiring insurance.
- xapata 6y ago> requiring insurance That's effectively a tax, outsourcing collection to insurance companies. I'm fine with that, too.