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Antitrust trials in US are just for show and limited hang out for the public. No antitrust trials has ever resulted in truly resulted in more competition for t

Antitrust trials in US are just for show and limited hang out for the public. No antitrust trials has ever resulted in truly resulted in more competition for the smaller players. Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. In fact everything has just consolidated over last few decades. Now we ended up with handful of people owning everything and rigging markets all over the place. What we need to focus on is how to create decentralized open source free(libre) software, networks, hardware and platform alternatives for what FANNGs are offering.

Garvi 3y ago
[flagged]
- hooo 3y ago
  Why don’t you tell us what they’re doing then?
  - Garvi 3y ago
    Because it's always a waste of time for multiple reasons.
- leereeves 3y ago
  In China, instead of business owners consolidating power, they have government leaders consolidating power.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Isn't there a word for statist capitalism?
    - tadfisher 3y ago
      The term is "state capitalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
- TheDong 3y ago
  Sorry, friend, but you're on a website created by a "startup accelerator" company surrounded by people who genuinely believe in capitalism and the free market, and have strong libertarian streaks. The point of startups and VCs is to create _private_ wealth for individuals by either taking money from the poor (they deserve it, they weren't smart enough to learn to code or to become startup founders), or from the government (it would be wasted anyway). China is obviously worse than the US because the government exerts more control, and so there's really only 1 entity that owns everything (the government), so clearly it has an even worse anti-trust problem. No one can compete with the government fairly, right? Whereas in america, the government will not stop you from making the 20th "AI Driven Auto-Crypto-Investment Smart Brokerage with Ads" that steals money from the poor (regular americans) and gives it to the rich (VC investors). Heck, as a "small business" you can get some nice preferential treatment to fleece people.
  - Garvi 3y ago
    > China is obviously worse than the US because the government exerts more control Obviously. Did you ever consider that what you call "state control" in an Orwellian manner, is called regulations in other circles? You're arguing an unregulated market is the height of capitalism. In reality such markets always monopolize and form entities closer resembling Stalinist era state monopolies than what you would call capitalism. China will out-capitalize the US, which is drowning in corruption. But apparently learning from your "opponent" is not something that is even permitted to be thought about. But then again everybody knows fighting corruption is good. It's just that when it's the Chinese doing it, it's called "taking out the political competition" in our media, even when completely unfounded. In the US, letting corporations get away with way too much is called freedom.
- hk__2 3y ago
  It’d be more helpful if you actually said what you wanted, instead of writing "I would say it but […]".
barrysteve 3y ago
The only way to cut people out is to put the old world philosophical ideas into manualized, black box, software. The CPU is a slave to special interest groups, liberating the CPU from beaucracy and market forces, is only a matter of time. Electronics has been shielded from proper conceptual innovation, by social forces intent on using the system to control the globe. The conceptual freedom in Eve online is a better model for the internet, than SimCity.
Barrin92 3y ago
> Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. That's one of the biggest arguments for a breakup and factually correct. Historically antitrust action has unlocked value. The point of any good antitrust policy isn't to destroy value, but to increase competition. If the broken up companies in the aggregate are worth more your policy has succeeded. Some companies like Alibaba or JD have actually started to spinoff segments themselves due to investor pressure. the open source free software utopia is a pipe dream in the foreseeable future, but more importantly, if it wasn't that's not an argument against improving market conditions. Open source developers benefit from competition like everyone else. It arguably increases the need for interoperable, open software.
- vishnugupta 3y ago
  What if the value thus unlocked doesn’t get passed on to the end customers and instead goes to a few share holders/owners? My impression of anti trust laws was that they are meant to benefit the end customers, isn’t it the case?
  - criley2 3y ago
    Yes, businesses will return value to shareholders by default. But here's the thing about competition: If there is one monopoly, it can simply return all profit to shareholders and ignore the customer If that is split into 5 businesses, then consumers must choose. Whichever company consumers don't choose will do poorly and their investors will suffer. Whichever company does will will do well and their shareholders will be rewarded. So how does the game play out? They compete. They make a case to you why you should choose them. They introduce new products with differentiated features that will win the market. They undercut the competition and accept a smaller profit (or even a loss) in exchange for marketshare. They compete for your business. At the end of the day, the increased profit might go to shareholders, but the rest of competition (reduced prices, new and better products, etc) go to the customer.
    - oblio 3y ago
      I'd argue that it probably also helps employees, since now there are multiple companies competing for their labor. A single employer for sure depresses wages.
Podgajski 3y ago
> Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. Isn't the break up of monopolies supposed to benefit the consumer as well by lowering prices, which most economists argue that it did? IF if the owners made more money, and the consumers saved money, I would say that is a great argument for breaking up Google as well.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  Only in the abstract is antitrust supposed to benefit consumers. The goal of antitrust is to promote competition [1] but there's no requirement that competition results in lower prices. I would bet the better part of competition is not a reduction in price but a prevention of stagnation. Imo, the huge stagnation in USA's internet is purely a lack of competition. When Google Fiber showed up all of the sudden encombents could offer 10x the speeds. If horse shoe owners somehow were vertically integrated and controlled iron in the US; I have no doubt they would've squashed the automotive industry. [1]: https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Did you read your own citation “These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition” The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      > Did you read your own citation >“These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition” > The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition Which part don't you understand. 1) In my second sentence I explicitly call out promoting competition is the goal of anti-trust 2) Parent was saying that anti-trust's goal was to lower prices.
fullarr 3y ago
Oh yeah I remember when Microsoft lost its antitrust trial and we all only use Internet Explorer and Windows now RIP in peace Apple and Linux
- meragrin_ 3y ago
  What does the antitrust trial have to do with Apple and Linux? It did nothing to help either of them in any sort of way. Apple wasn't trying to sell anything on the PC or Windows platform. Apple was developing their own hardware and software. Linux never really competed in the same markets as Microsoft either.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Microsoft literally invested in Apple at their darkest hour, when they were close to bankruptcy. Microsoft also kept the main pro software suite running on Apple's garbage OS and then ported it to Mac OS X, just to try to stave off the antitrust proceedings, further helping Apple claw its way back. Microsoft and Adobe basically saved Mac OS and Apple, allowing Apple to bounce back a few years later.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      This also shows a severe lack of understanding of history. Microsoft invested a whopping $250 million in Apple. Apple already had secured a $4 billion line of credit and didn’t become profitable until losing billions more. The $250 wouldn’t have saved Apple. Also, Apple turned around the next quarter and bought PowerComputings Mac assets for $100 million. And Office was not charity project for MS, it made a hefty profit. Also it was much easier to convince corporate buyers to buy Office if they could use on Office Suite across their entire organization - even for those hippie Mac users in the corner
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        250 out 4000 is non trivial. Office for mac may have been profitable, but it may have been more profitable to not allow Mac to have it.
malfist 3y ago
Trust busting's goal isn't to keep big businesses from making money, that isn't it's purpose. So to say trust busting is ineffectual because it doesn't meet that goal is a non-sequiter.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. A few things happened. Sure MS wasn't broken up, but they were forced to be more cautious with how they leveraged their desktop monopoly for several years. Arguably this gave Firefox, and later Chrome, a foot in the door that they otherwise wouldn't have had. It's important not to fall into binary thinking. Breaking up a (near) monopoly is not the only measure of success in antitrust.
- callalex 3y ago
  That attitude has already fallen apart though. There are a lot of offerings these days for cloud based file syncing, chat, gaming, email, document editing etc. etc. but you can’t even turn on and log into a Windows machine without being forced to make and use a Microsoft account for those things.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I mean, it's really easy to avoid all that if you don't use windows. I may be a bit confused on what point you're making.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > That attitude has already fallen apart though. Yes it has. I don't think any antitrust action could be "one and done" in a way that wouldn't allow future abuse of a monopoly position. "Ma Bell" was broken up, but its children have re-coalesed into monopoly-ish companies over time. That's why it's so annoying that US antitrust has been napping for the last 2 decades instead of continuing to monitor and ensure market fairness.
majani 3y ago
Right observation, wrong conclusion. I would conclude that the pareto principle is just a force of nature and it always yields it's ugly head no matter the effort to beat it down
TimPC 3y ago
You aren't going to get decentralized free open search that's any good because search lends itself to being a business because of the absurd costs involved. The bare minimum table stakes are 1. Index the entire internet and 2. Have a good method of efficiently selecting a subset of that index relevant to a query. Both of those steps are extremely expensive and work far better in approaches that accumulate revenue to offset costs.
- bobajeff 3y ago
  People are still saying that Google's index (and server clusters) are far and above the competition and that might be still true but what does it matter when they are throwing out indexed data from older pages? Also if most of the webs content is consolidated into a few sites like reddit, stack exchange and Wikipedia, IMDb etc. then doesn't the search index only need to be about as big as those sites? I just don't see results I'm getting from today's Google meaningfully far and above the others and increasingly more and more I have to use either another search engine or search the site directly to find what I'm looking for.
danaris 3y ago
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. This just shows that you weren't actually paying attention to what happened to the MS antitrust trial. Judge Jackson was all ready to impose serious penalties—I don't recall the exact details, but I know that there was at least talk of spinning off IE from Microsoft entirely. Then George W Bush was elected, and basically tossed the whole thing out. This set a precedent that has, in part, allowed the massive consolidation in the tech sector we see today. The Microsoft antitrust trial is a perfect example of the difference between Democrats and Republicans in this country on antitrust. In any case, regardless of anything you think you know about antitrust over the past several decades, Biden's FTC under Lina Khan has explicitly repudiated the Chicago School bullshit metrics for when monopoly behavior is worth punishing. The importance of this to antitrust in the US cannot be overstated. As long as it is allowed to stand, this will mark a sea change in the way the government treats mergers as well as anticompetitive behavior.
codexb 3y ago
I'd say the breakup of Ma Bell actually made things worse for about 30 years for consumers. It wasn't until they began consolidating again over the past 20 years that things began to improve.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I mean, you might say that, but I'm guessing you were not trying to plug your own devices into the phone line at that time.
gilbetron 3y ago
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. Google ... Google happened. MS dominated computing then, and they would have dominated the web if they could've forced everyone to stay on IE and use their search capabilities. The antitrust trial prevented that and probably can be credited with allowing the modern web explosion. Even if you argue the explosion would've happened, it certainly would've happened slower and undoubtedly poorer, if you were around during the MS era, you would know what I mean.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. The 2000 Presidential election happened, resulting in a change of executive policy, both in the big picture ideologically, and arguably specifically with Microsoft for corporate political alignment/influence reasons. But that’s very much a special case, not a general pattern.
webdoodle 3y ago
Yep, and in the case of criminals like Bill Gates, the U.S Gov used the antitrust trials to ensure he knew that they own him. It was a strong man operation through and through. U.S. Gov wants backdoors into Windows? Bill Gates: Yes Sir!
grishka 3y ago
For the tech world, fixing monopolies is easy — just make adversarial interoperability fully legal. Sure, it already exists now, but my understanding is that as far as US law goes, it's in a grey zone (other places, like Russia and some EU countries, have better laws about this). Then the situation will fix itself. Whenever a popular online service enshittifies, it would quickly get reduced to its infrastructure and lose any semblance of control over its UX because third-party user-respecting client software would start popping up.

Garvi 3y ago

[flagged]

hooo 3y ago
Why don’t you tell us what they’re doing then?
- Garvi 3y ago
  Because it's always a waste of time for multiple reasons.
leereeves 3y ago
In China, instead of business owners consolidating power, they have government leaders consolidating power.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Isn't there a word for statist capitalism?
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    The term is "state capitalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
TheDong 3y ago
Sorry, friend, but you're on a website created by a "startup accelerator" company surrounded by people who genuinely believe in capitalism and the free market, and have strong libertarian streaks. The point of startups and VCs is to create _private_ wealth for individuals by either taking money from the poor (they deserve it, they weren't smart enough to learn to code or to become startup founders), or from the government (it would be wasted anyway). China is obviously worse than the US because the government exerts more control, and so there's really only 1 entity that owns everything (the government), so clearly it has an even worse anti-trust problem. No one can compete with the government fairly, right? Whereas in america, the government will not stop you from making the 20th "AI Driven Auto-Crypto-Investment Smart Brokerage with Ads" that steals money from the poor (regular americans) and gives it to the rich (VC investors). Heck, as a "small business" you can get some nice preferential treatment to fleece people.
- Garvi 3y ago
  > China is obviously worse than the US because the government exerts more control Obviously. Did you ever consider that what you call "state control" in an Orwellian manner, is called regulations in other circles? You're arguing an unregulated market is the height of capitalism. In reality such markets always monopolize and form entities closer resembling Stalinist era state monopolies than what you would call capitalism. China will out-capitalize the US, which is drowning in corruption. But apparently learning from your "opponent" is not something that is even permitted to be thought about. But then again everybody knows fighting corruption is good. It's just that when it's the Chinese doing it, it's called "taking out the political competition" in our media, even when completely unfounded. In the US, letting corporations get away with way too much is called freedom.
hk__2 3y ago
It’d be more helpful if you actually said what you wanted, instead of writing "I would say it but […]".

barrysteve 3y ago

The only way to cut people out is to put the old world philosophical ideas into manualized, black box, software. The CPU is a slave to special interest groups, liberating the CPU from beaucracy and market forces, is only a matter of time. Electronics has been shielded from proper conceptual innovation, by social forces intent on using the system to control the globe. The conceptual freedom in Eve online is a better model for the internet, than SimCity.

Barrin92 3y ago

> Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. That's one of the biggest arguments for a breakup and factually correct. Historically antitrust action has unlocked value. The point of any good antitrust policy isn't to destroy value, but to increase competition. If the broken up companies in the aggregate are worth more your policy has succeeded. Some companies like Alibaba or JD have actually started to spinoff segments themselves due to investor pressure. the open source free software utopia is a pipe dream in the foreseeable future, but more importantly, if it wasn't that's not an argument against improving market conditions. Open source developers benefit from competition like everyone else. It arguably increases the need for interoperable, open software.

vishnugupta 3y ago
What if the value thus unlocked doesn’t get passed on to the end customers and instead goes to a few share holders/owners? My impression of anti trust laws was that they are meant to benefit the end customers, isn’t it the case?
- criley2 3y ago
  Yes, businesses will return value to shareholders by default. But here's the thing about competition: If there is one monopoly, it can simply return all profit to shareholders and ignore the customer If that is split into 5 businesses, then consumers must choose. Whichever company consumers don't choose will do poorly and their investors will suffer. Whichever company does will will do well and their shareholders will be rewarded. So how does the game play out? They compete. They make a case to you why you should choose them. They introduce new products with differentiated features that will win the market. They undercut the competition and accept a smaller profit (or even a loss) in exchange for marketshare. They compete for your business. At the end of the day, the increased profit might go to shareholders, but the rest of competition (reduced prices, new and better products, etc) go to the customer.
  - oblio 3y ago
    I'd argue that it probably also helps employees, since now there are multiple companies competing for their labor. A single employer for sure depresses wages.

Podgajski 3y ago

> Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. Isn't the break up of monopolies supposed to benefit the consumer as well by lowering prices, which most economists argue that it did? IF if the owners made more money, and the consumers saved money, I would say that is a great argument for breaking up Google as well.

lesuorac 3y ago
Only in the abstract is antitrust supposed to benefit consumers. The goal of antitrust is to promote competition [1] but there's no requirement that competition results in lower prices. I would bet the better part of competition is not a reduction in price but a prevention of stagnation. Imo, the huge stagnation in USA's internet is purely a lack of competition. When Google Fiber showed up all of the sudden encombents could offer 10x the speeds. If horse shoe owners somehow were vertically integrated and controlled iron in the US; I have no doubt they would've squashed the automotive industry. [1]: https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Did you read your own citation “These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition” The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    > Did you read your own citation >“These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition” > The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition Which part don't you understand. 1) In my second sentence I explicitly call out promoting competition is the goal of anti-trust 2) Parent was saying that anti-trust's goal was to lower prices.

fullarr 3y ago

Oh yeah I remember when Microsoft lost its antitrust trial and we all only use Internet Explorer and Windows now RIP in peace Apple and Linux

meragrin_ 3y ago
What does the antitrust trial have to do with Apple and Linux? It did nothing to help either of them in any sort of way. Apple wasn't trying to sell anything on the PC or Windows platform. Apple was developing their own hardware and software. Linux never really competed in the same markets as Microsoft either.
- oblio 3y ago
  Microsoft literally invested in Apple at their darkest hour, when they were close to bankruptcy. Microsoft also kept the main pro software suite running on Apple's garbage OS and then ported it to Mac OS X, just to try to stave off the antitrust proceedings, further helping Apple claw its way back. Microsoft and Adobe basically saved Mac OS and Apple, allowing Apple to bounce back a few years later.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    This also shows a severe lack of understanding of history. Microsoft invested a whopping $250 million in Apple. Apple already had secured a $4 billion line of credit and didn’t become profitable until losing billions more. The $250 wouldn’t have saved Apple. Also, Apple turned around the next quarter and bought PowerComputings Mac assets for $100 million. And Office was not charity project for MS, it made a hefty profit. Also it was much easier to convince corporate buyers to buy Office if they could use on Office Suite across their entire organization - even for those hippie Mac users in the corner
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      250 out 4000 is non trivial. Office for mac may have been profitable, but it may have been more profitable to not allow Mac to have it.

malfist 3y ago

Trust busting's goal isn't to keep big businesses from making money, that isn't it's purpose. So to say trust busting is ineffectual because it doesn't meet that goal is a non-sequiter.

AlexandrB 3y ago

> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. A few things happened. Sure MS wasn't broken up, but they were forced to be more cautious with how they leveraged their desktop monopoly for several years. Arguably this gave Firefox, and later Chrome, a foot in the door that they otherwise wouldn't have had. It's important not to fall into binary thinking. Breaking up a (near) monopoly is not the only measure of success in antitrust.

callalex 3y ago
That attitude has already fallen apart though. There are a lot of offerings these days for cloud based file syncing, chat, gaming, email, document editing etc. etc. but you can’t even turn on and log into a Windows machine without being forced to make and use a Microsoft account for those things.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I mean, it's really easy to avoid all that if you don't use windows. I may be a bit confused on what point you're making.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > That attitude has already fallen apart though. Yes it has. I don't think any antitrust action could be "one and done" in a way that wouldn't allow future abuse of a monopoly position. "Ma Bell" was broken up, but its children have re-coalesed into monopoly-ish companies over time. That's why it's so annoying that US antitrust has been napping for the last 2 decades instead of continuing to monitor and ensure market fairness.

majani 3y ago

Right observation, wrong conclusion. I would conclude that the pareto principle is just a force of nature and it always yields it's ugly head no matter the effort to beat it down

TimPC 3y ago

You aren't going to get decentralized free open search that's any good because search lends itself to being a business because of the absurd costs involved. The bare minimum table stakes are 1. Index the entire internet and 2. Have a good method of efficiently selecting a subset of that index relevant to a query. Both of those steps are extremely expensive and work far better in approaches that accumulate revenue to offset costs.

bobajeff 3y ago
People are still saying that Google's index (and server clusters) are far and above the competition and that might be still true but what does it matter when they are throwing out indexed data from older pages? Also if most of the webs content is consolidated into a few sites like reddit, stack exchange and Wikipedia, IMDb etc. then doesn't the search index only need to be about as big as those sites? I just don't see results I'm getting from today's Google meaningfully far and above the others and increasingly more and more I have to use either another search engine or search the site directly to find what I'm looking for.

danaris 3y ago

> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. This just shows that you weren't actually paying attention to what happened to the MS antitrust trial. Judge Jackson was all ready to impose serious penalties—I don't recall the exact details, but I know that there was at least talk of spinning off IE from Microsoft entirely. Then George W Bush was elected, and basically tossed the whole thing out. This set a precedent that has, in part, allowed the massive consolidation in the tech sector we see today. The Microsoft antitrust trial is a perfect example of the difference between Democrats and Republicans in this country on antitrust. In any case, regardless of anything you think you know about antitrust over the past several decades, Biden's FTC under Lina Khan has explicitly repudiated the Chicago School bullshit metrics for when monopoly behavior is worth punishing. The importance of this to antitrust in the US cannot be overstated. As long as it is allowed to stand, this will mark a sea change in the way the government treats mergers as well as anticompetitive behavior.

codexb 3y ago

I'd say the breakup of Ma Bell actually made things worse for about 30 years for consumers. It wasn't until they began consolidating again over the past 20 years that things began to improve.

pixl97 3y ago
I mean, you might say that, but I'm guessing you were not trying to plug your own devices into the phone line at that time.

gilbetron 3y ago

> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. Google ... Google happened. MS dominated computing then, and they would have dominated the web if they could've forced everyone to stay on IE and use their search capabilities. The antitrust trial prevented that and probably can be credited with allowing the modern web explosion. Even if you argue the explosion would've happened, it certainly would've happened slower and undoubtedly poorer, if you were around during the MS era, you would know what I mean.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. The 2000 Presidential election happened, resulting in a change of executive policy, both in the big picture ideologically, and arguably specifically with Microsoft for corporate political alignment/influence reasons. But that’s very much a special case, not a general pattern.

webdoodle 3y ago

Yep, and in the case of criminals like Bill Gates, the U.S Gov used the antitrust trials to ensure he knew that they own him. It was a strong man operation through and through. U.S. Gov wants backdoors into Windows? Bill Gates: Yes Sir!

grishka 3y ago

For the tech world, fixing monopolies is easy — just make adversarial interoperability fully legal. Sure, it already exists now, but my understanding is that as far as US law goes, it's in a grey zone (other places, like Russia and some EU countries, have better laws about this). Then the situation will fix itself. Whenever a popular online service enshittifies, it would quickly get reduced to its infrastructure and lose any semblance of control over its UX because third-party user-respecting client software would start popping up.