4 ms·

OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being

by simonh 5y ago

OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being monopolies, accepting for a moment that they are. I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?

salawat 5y ago
Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces. Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum. Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space. Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list. Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period. The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase. It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue. The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting. Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled. I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility. All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.
- simonh 5y ago
  I get you on Amazon, they are abusing their function as a market platform for others and that needs cracking down on. That's not really anything to do with being a monopoly, it's just abuse, I suppose being dominant makes it easier to do it. That's not going to stop them dominating the market though, just stop them abusing that dominance. How does spinning off google's non-search businesses address the dominance of Google search? I don't see how gmail or docs makes any difference to that. I don't see how making Youtube a separate company benefits youtube users. How does spinning off Instagram and whatsApp from the facebook social network make any difference to anything? The facebook social network would still be dominant. It would make no difference to their ability to collude with google on ads, those are completely orthogonal issues. I'm not saying these companies aren't dominant in their market segment. They should not be allowed to abuse that dominance through e.g. coluding on ad placement. Regulation and enforcement is needed. However nothing you have suggested would make any difference to the dominance of google search or of the facebook social network. I also don't see how it would benefit users. Can anyone who buys the idea that google search is a monopoly, or that facebook social network is a monopoly, tell me how they would end those monopolies, why they would do it, and what the benefits would be?
  - salawat 5y ago
    With Google Search, your Ad dominance is tightly coupled to the effectiveness of the search engine. The actual effectiveness nowadays of Google Search as a finder of information is secondary to the brand recognition and that everyone reaches for it. Separating those two interests keeps the incentives aligned. Google search has been made strictly worse through the tight integration of the advertising functionality. The other issue with Google is the tendency to acquire and kill potential competitors. This inhibits a truly competitive marketplace. Yes, denormalization of market task introduces inefficiency in resource consumption, but increases systemic resilience and overall opportunity for gainful employment. It also creates career mobility, and prevents issues created by non-competes which have been well known to cripple or otherwise hobble skilled employees in rather small or highly consolidated industrial verticals. YouTube? Society gains by not having a company ultimately accountable to the same exact people. The virtue of the Free Market is that regression to the mean makes sure the system remains healthy since you've got a larger sampling of capital allocators. When you start seeing the same faces over and over again leading most of the big names in Tech when you track the actual corporate hierarchy, you have a problem. We're also coming out of a period of huge pushing into n young people to get a college education to prepare them for dealing with non-trivial issues of balancing the nuances of a healthy business through whatever specialized vertical they have. You don't need more consolidation. That's the opposite of what you want unless you are literally trying to get entrepreneurial talent to pursue other directions; a task made more difficult by hyperoptimization contagion created by having to compete with overly consolidated market actors. Spinning off WhatsApp and Instagram rips out large chunks of social graph from Facebook, or would if you enforced the split up to include a cleansing of their dataset of any data acquired through those acquisitions. To be clear, I am not a nice understanding trust buster. If you've attracted my attention to the point these companies have, this will hurt. I don't care how impractical or unfair it seems. I've thought about this for quite a long time actually. Impractically so. It's not exactly something anyone ever comes and asks you about though. I kinda wish more people would. Older I get the more fascinating these types of dynamic systems are to think through.

by simonh 5y ago

salawat 5y ago

Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces. Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum. Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space. Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list. Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period. The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase. It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue. The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting. Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled. I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility. All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.

simonh 5y ago
I get you on Amazon, they are abusing their function as a market platform for others and that needs cracking down on. That's not really anything to do with being a monopoly, it's just abuse, I suppose being dominant makes it easier to do it. That's not going to stop them dominating the market though, just stop them abusing that dominance. How does spinning off google's non-search businesses address the dominance of Google search? I don't see how gmail or docs makes any difference to that. I don't see how making Youtube a separate company benefits youtube users. How does spinning off Instagram and whatsApp from the facebook social network make any difference to anything? The facebook social network would still be dominant. It would make no difference to their ability to collude with google on ads, those are completely orthogonal issues. I'm not saying these companies aren't dominant in their market segment. They should not be allowed to abuse that dominance through e.g. coluding on ad placement. Regulation and enforcement is needed. However nothing you have suggested would make any difference to the dominance of google search or of the facebook social network. I also don't see how it would benefit users. Can anyone who buys the idea that google search is a monopoly, or that facebook social network is a monopoly, tell me how they would end those monopolies, why they would do it, and what the benefits would be?
- salawat 5y ago
  With Google Search, your Ad dominance is tightly coupled to the effectiveness of the search engine. The actual effectiveness nowadays of Google Search as a finder of information is secondary to the brand recognition and that everyone reaches for it. Separating those two interests keeps the incentives aligned. Google search has been made strictly worse through the tight integration of the advertising functionality. The other issue with Google is the tendency to acquire and kill potential competitors. This inhibits a truly competitive marketplace. Yes, denormalization of market task introduces inefficiency in resource consumption, but increases systemic resilience and overall opportunity for gainful employment. It also creates career mobility, and prevents issues created by non-competes which have been well known to cripple or otherwise hobble skilled employees in rather small or highly consolidated industrial verticals. YouTube? Society gains by not having a company ultimately accountable to the same exact people. The virtue of the Free Market is that regression to the mean makes sure the system remains healthy since you've got a larger sampling of capital allocators. When you start seeing the same faces over and over again leading most of the big names in Tech when you track the actual corporate hierarchy, you have a problem. We're also coming out of a period of huge pushing into n young people to get a college education to prepare them for dealing with non-trivial issues of balancing the nuances of a healthy business through whatever specialized vertical they have. You don't need more consolidation. That's the opposite of what you want unless you are literally trying to get entrepreneurial talent to pursue other directions; a task made more difficult by hyperoptimization contagion created by having to compete with overly consolidated market actors. Spinning off WhatsApp and Instagram rips out large chunks of social graph from Facebook, or would if you enforced the split up to include a cleansing of their dataset of any data acquired through those acquisitions. To be clear, I am not a nice understanding trust buster. If you've attracted my attention to the point these companies have, this will hurt. I don't care how impractical or unfair it seems. I've thought about this for quite a long time actually. Impractically so. It's not exactly something anyone ever comes and asks you about though. I kinda wish more people would. Older I get the more fascinating these types of dynamic systems are to think through.