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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 bein

• 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.
  • simonh 5y ago
    I like your point about reducing consolidation to increase variety in control and management. It’s an interesting point, but I’m not sure there’s any actual law they are breaking by just owning and running multiple businesses. I would have thought legally speaking they would need to perform some form of market abuse to justify enforcement. Yes there have been abuses and they should be held to account, but we have laws fur that already and breaking up companies doesn’t do anything to stop such abuses. Google and Facebook are separate businesses and the still colluded. It’s the abuse that’s illegal in such cases, not the ownership structure. I dint see how you can split off Google search from advertising things. Would you split up a newspaper and the business function that sells ad space on it? How? I suppose ads do make it less useful, but honestly it’s still the best by far, even if some others are now mostly good enough. I’m with you on preventing the buying and elimination of competitors, but there are already mechanisms to do that. All acquisitions have to go through regulatory review.