A lot of talk about agile digital monopolies maneuvering quickly to crowd out competition but little talk about actual consumer harm or extracted rents. Amazon

A lot of talk about agile digital monopolies maneuvering quickly to crowd out competition but little talk about actual consumer harm or extracted rents. Amazon subsidizing one-day shipping or Facebook rapidly building out new features may harm competitors but it makes me better off, at least in a narrow sense. He also makes the argument that the quick-moving digital world allows monopolists to pivot to protect their position in a way erstwhile analog monopolists could not, but neglects mentioning that the same logic also removes significant barriers to entry for competitors: > John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly. It's pretty crazy to suggest removing capital-intensive constraints like those of physical infrastructure strengthens monopolistic positions.