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Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the

• teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Yes, 100%. It would be better for the economy, the workers, and the users.
  • slowmovintarget 2y ago
    What evidence do you have for that? Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)
• bcrosby95 2y ago
  I assume they would just pull some shenanigans to stay under the cap.
  • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    I wish there was a way to turn “I’m pretty sure this business is pulling some BS” into “Just shut them the fuck down already”. But that would probably require the Justice system to work.
    • ghodith 2y ago
      Sounds like a power that would be ripe for abuse in it's own rite.
    • PoignardAzur 2y ago
      That's like saying "I wish cops could arrest people everybody knows is guilty and leave innocent people alone". If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
  • gpm 2y ago
    Announcing GoogleSquared, it's an entity which is entitled to precisely half of Googles profit (or loss) in any year before stock buy backs and dividends. It will buy back exactly as many shares of stock as Google does every year, issue exactly as many stocks as Google does every year to exactly the same entities, and issue exactly the same dividends, and do nothing else. Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock. (perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
• bigthymer 2y ago
  The NSA prefers getting all user data at a one-stop shop.
• zulban 2y ago
  When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
  • thiagoharry 2y ago
    I agree that the solution is unrealistical. But not for this reason: the "no limit" is also arbitrary and people do not agree if this is right. Moreover, lots of people do not agree with regulations and norms in society, but society creates these things and people learn to comply to live in society.
  • swores 2y ago
    Isn't that true for many if not most laws? We don't not have taxes just because lots of people will argue they're too high or too low, we don't not have a criminal justice system because people will argue sentences are too harsh or too lenient. Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
  • raincole 2y ago
    Legal age of drinking is arbitrary and people accept it. Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries). The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.
    • cyanmagenta 2y ago
      I think it’d be more accurate to say “imprecise” rather than “arbitrary.” For example, the legal drinking age is set to 21 (or whatever) based on politicians’ estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences. It’s true that there is no way to exactly specify a perfect age limit, but that doesn’t mean the limit was set randomly without any reason or basis, i.e., arbitrarily. Sorry if I’m being too pedantic; it’s just one of those nights I suppose.
• brg 2y ago
  I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.
  • therebedragons 2y ago
    [dead]
• bruce511 2y ago
  How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
  • jdewerd 2y ago
    The complaint was about Google's "talk to the hand" onboarding/feedback process, not the preferences of advertisers.
    • bruce511 2y ago
      Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless. On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless. Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
      • MadnessASAP 2y ago
        I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/products. If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
        • lostlogin 2y ago
          They could be a monopoly, then the equation works.
        • auggierose 2y ago
          It seems in Google's case, a lot of value.
        • 2y ago
• daedrdev 2y ago
  It is possible that a policy like this makes society worse off.
• worewood 2y ago
  What you're saying is heresy in a capitalist world. It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue. Beware of that while reading the responses.
  • drstewart 2y ago
    "I'm right and you're wrong and anyone who tries to say otherwise proves that I'm right" is some kind of take. Beware that you're a hypocrite and don't realize it so you will argue that you aren't, but it's proof that you are.
    • Dylan16807 2y ago
      > "anyone who tries to say otherwise proves that I'm right" It's super obnoxious when someone says that. But the comment you're replying to does not say that.
• dools 2y ago
  I don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!
  • VelesDude 2y ago
    This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously. This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
    • dools 2y ago
      Yeah, so I think that the issue isn't that Apple does several things well, it's that they do something well and then only consume that product themselves. To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on. That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
  • majani 2y ago
    That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game
• Eiim 2y ago
  Nvidia is a great example of why a flat rule like this wouldn't work. Nvidia pretty much just does one, pretty specialized thing (GPUs) and trying to break it up into >10 pieces worth <$20B each (approximate median GDP of African nations by IMF) would be completely unnecessary. Just their gaming GPUs had ~$6B in profit in just the last year alone, and we know that their market cap comes much more from the AI market. We definitely could use stronger anti-monopoly laws, but market cap limits aren't the way to do it.
• vitus 2y ago
  > If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries What does this mean? In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion. Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP. The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today. Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then? (I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
  • Scarblac 2y ago
    I assume he picked some ridiculously high number as a starting point. In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies. That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
    • iraqmtpizza 2y ago
      Definitely don't move to Singapore or Switzerland, then. You're going to want to look at places like Eritrea and Bolivia
• noobermin 2y ago
  So, I'm generally aware how monopolies form but given I'm not a web developer, what are the difficulties in starting a competing ad revenue company in the world today beyond the typical difficulties facing starting companies/startups?
  • matsemann 2y ago
    If what you make is an ad platform, you have the normal chicken egg problem that without your ad network existing on many pages, no one wants to buy ads from you, and opposite way that without lots of ad buyers no one wants to reserve room for your ad network on their site. But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts: - they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them. Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
• tored 2y ago
  Assume this is doable, but who would legislate that? US congress that is already bought and paid for by the very same companies?
• LtdJorge 2y ago
  But who are you (or me) to decide if they should exist at that size?
  • squidbeak 2y ago
    Not you or me, but you and me and everyone else collectively, in the way that's typical for regulation.
• vitiral 2y ago
  > borg controlling the internet Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...