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The DOJ has a lawsuit against Google in the works, it's even mentioned in the article. [[I'm hesitant to provide a citation as I'm not sure of the latest source

• vmception 5y ago
  Also aside from corruption and capture, there are external forces. States really have little leverage, they want competition but could really just wind up completely unserviced as a corporation says bye bye to their irrelevant market. The feds dont go heavy handed as they have the capability to and massive leverage, but actually debilitating a company could be giving the market to the other remaining companies which from their perspective is worse because they created the monopoly.
  • djbusby 5y ago
    So? Do nothing and let the current monopoly get stronger?
    • nverno 5y ago
      I think it is a safe bet that there will always be new monopolies developing. There are always new markets, and benefits often don't scale linearly with growth. It's a complicated, error-prone business, trying to disrupt monopolies effectively in such a way that is actually beneficial to the community. If you think about it, the cost/benefit analysis is based largely on economic predictions which are never that accurate.
      • djbusby 5y ago
        Shouldn't the DOJ not be concerned with the economic impact? Isn't their objective Justice not Economic Prosperity?
        • nverno 5y ago
          In the US, they are concerned with economic impact, they do a whole in-depth economic cost/benefit analysis as part of determining if it's worth breaking up a monopolist. Whatever 'justice' means in this scenario seems highly subjective. If a monopolist was providing by far the best/cheapest goods and services, more people might prefer that scenario to an alternative competitive market with less benefit on average. It's arguably unjust for the government to handicap specific people, but also unjust for others not to feel like they all have a fair shot to capture the market. Any time people, not fate, are in charge of handicapping some people will think they are getting the shaft.
          • robbedpeter 5y ago
            That sounds rational, but it's not. There's nobody, public or private sector, nobody at all that can make a real economic assessment of the value of a service line Facebook or Google. Those who claim otherwise are stupid, lying, or selling something. Markets and economics are unpredictable systems that have nothing to do with models of rational actors behaving in their own self interest. They're fundamentally extensions of chaotic biological systems and inherently resistant to oracles as a matter of mathematical reality. What would be rational is if we actually endeavored as a society to make sure everyone is accountable to the same rules to the same degree. By using this magical thinking / cost benefit analysis, we're simply incentivizing victory for the best storytelling middleman.
            • nverno 5y ago
              I think the difficulties/uncertainties you mention here are a large factor in the feds reluctance to break up monopolies. I have no personal opinion on these methods without taking a much deeper dive into the details. It does seem like the big breakup of Ma Bell worked out well, though. The statement "everyone is accountable to the same rules to the same degree" could be either pro- or anti- federal action.
      • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        > I think it is a safe bet that there will always be new monopolies developing. There are always new markets, and benefits often don't scale linearly with growth. Find a monopoly and you'll probably find a regulation propping it up. For many of these tech companies it's DMCA 1201 and other things that prohibit adversarial interoperability. If you have a law that lets you boot competitors out of adjacent markets once you have dominance in one of them, you take over the other one too. Then nobody can compete with you unless they can replace you in both markets, meanwhile you enter a third. The first thing we need is to get rid of such laws.
        • MereInterest 5y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
          • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
            This tech stuff isn't a natural monopoly. The defining characteristic of a natural monopoly is that customer is paying a large amount per unit to cover costs that stay the same no matter the amount of usage. The per-unit cost for most of this tech stuff is approximately zero, and the ones that aren't zero (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing) have significant unit production costs and are not a natural monopoly either. It's also questionable whether even "natural monopolies" would be monopolies absent regulation. It's more efficient to have a single power grid, but if there was no law granting a statutory monopoly to a single provider and the existing provider became abusive, somebody would build a parallel power grid. Because having two would cost twice as much as having one, but that's still less than paying five times as much to an unrestrained monopolist. So the result of unregulated "natural monopoly" still isn't a monopoly, it's just competition which is unusually inefficient.
            • mrep 5y ago
              I would argue it basically is because the high fixed costs are from paying the developers to write and maintain good competitive software and the marginal cost of each new user is basically free. That exactly matches wiki: "A natural monopoly has a high fixed cost for a product that does not depend on output, but its marginal cost of producing one more good is roughly constant, and small."
    • vmception 5y ago
      They just try to make their stance clear that they want competition to be more organic than whatever they are reacting to. Monopolies arent prohibited, anti-competitive practices are sanctionable.
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > States really have little leverage, they want competition but could really just wind up completely unserviced as a corporation says bye bye to their irrelevant market. The state of Texas has a GDP similar to that of Canada, the state of New York to that of Russia, the state of California to that of France. Are these irrelevant markets? Even Vermont, all the way at the bottom, is beating out El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, etc. Also note that multiple states are joining together in the same suit. Even if a corporation was willing to abandon an entire state over this, then all the people in that state would need something else, and that something else would become big enough for third parties to have to care about it and thereby become a viable competitor everywhere. Which might just be the best thing that could happen.
    • vmception 5y ago
      When a service has a little asterisk that singles out some states they dont operate, its not necessarily because of a specific law, it can be in response to specific regulatory action against that service that they opted not to deal with