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You're almost there. Companies that aren't competitive should be broken up.
by thomastjeffery 5y ago
You're almost there. Companies that aren't competitive should be broken up.
- lolinder 5y agoWhat would it mean to break up Tinder? How do you partition a company that only has one product?
- butokai 5y agoNot sure what you mean by this, but Tinder's parent company controls several well known dating services (OkCupid, Meetic, Twoo and many more)
- lolinder 5y agoAh, fair enough. I was thinking OP meant Tinder specifically, but at the very least OkCupid could be split out.
- selfhoster11 5y agoPartition it geographically. If they want to compete in certain cities/regions/countries where the user base exceeds a certain number, they must spin off subsidiaries for that area. I can't imagine people looking for a date on the other end of the country outside of very specific circumstances.
- Majestic121 5y agoIt's pretty common to use Tinder for hook ups during holidays
- selfhoster11 5y agoThis is a specialised use case, just as I mentioned. Most people aren't on holiday at any given time.
- josephcsible 5y agoIsn't this how we just end up in the same situation we have with ISPs? It doesn't matter that we have Comcast, Cox, and Charter if any given area only has one of them.
- selfhoster11 5y agoBuilding an ISP requires investing in infrastructure. A dating app needs a UX designer and a few cloud instances. There's a world of difference in the required outlay when building a competitor.
- samhw 5y ago> they must spin off subsidiaries Eh? Subsidiaries aren't usually what people mean when they speak of breaking up companies. Subsidiaries are aligned with the parent company in terms of incentives, so it doesn't really change the landscape at all, besides worsening the user experience if you require the subsidiary to maintain its own isolated silo of users and data.
- lolinder 5y agoGeographic partition is what we did to Bell, and that really doesn't seem to have helped much. If the only way to choose a competitor is to move, there's still really no competition. No one spent thousands of dollars moving across the country because the telephone company there was better.
- netizen-936824 5y agoWeirdly enough that's what the US is doing with government on a state level. With people claiming that each state is an "experiment" even though the people there likely don't have a choice in the matter.
- lolinder 5y agoThe difference is that state policies are so impactful in everyday life that people very much do choose where they're going to live based at least in part on state government decisions. The same cannot be said for most corporations you could conceivably split along the same lines.
- aeternum 5y agoThey don't even need to be broken up. Anti-competitive mergers just need to be prevented.
- a-dub 5y agobroken up how and to what end? if you review definitions of antitrust and monopoly, you'll find they really do not apply to the dynamics at play with consumer internet services that displace existing decentralized norms and enjoy majority market share due to network effects. not saying there isn't a problem, but maybe trying to shoehorn 19th century solutions onto 21st century problems isn't the answer.