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Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a

Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. My business model in providing a better shopping experience revolves around selling my own food - I can vertically integrate this and make profit margins in places that another store might not be able to. Interfering with that harms both the experience to the consumer and that business as a whole which wasn’t doing anything wrong.

piva00 2y ago
> Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. You are completely ignoring network effects in all of this. A company might not have the best product but since it has most market penetration/capture (which doesn't mean it's the best product, aside from some spherical cow-type of model) it can curtail most of the competition or simply buy it to stamp it out. While also imposing a very high bar of anti-competition behaviour ignoring that it can be achieved through salami slicing tactics. Gatekeepers are of a size where they exert so much market power that it's not realistic for smaller business to compete with them even if they provide a potentially more valuable service to some customers of the behemoth. One has to abide by the rules of these market giants. Example: Amazon competing with its sellers on its own marketplace, they can simply price dump their competitors since they don't have to pay a merchant fee to themselves, they can extract the data about best selling products and create an Amazon Basics version of it that will inevitably be cheaper than their competition. That's not a fair market practice. Another example: Apple can bundle their services and sell through the App Store without paying the 30% fee to themselves, inevitably making their products more profitable (and potentially cheaper) than the competition simply because they are a gatekeeper. > The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. No, you are a small fish, you don't exert so much power in the market, it's not about you, it's about a very different league of business than you are. I think that's the part you don't understand, with different sizes probably it's best to have different rules because of how much power they can hold, you are trying to apply a simple model very broadly when it's not how real markets work. Even if you don't agree with Yanis Varoufakis I thoroughly recommend reading "Technofeudalism" to get some insights, at least to challenge the thesis, it's worth a read to understand what happens when these companies become gatekeepers creating their own fiefdoms.

piva00 2y ago

> Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. You are completely ignoring network effects in all of this. A company might not have the best product but since it has most market penetration/capture (which doesn't mean it's the best product, aside from some spherical cow-type of model) it can curtail most of the competition or simply buy it to stamp it out. While also imposing a very high bar of anti-competition behaviour ignoring that it can be achieved through salami slicing tactics. Gatekeepers are of a size where they exert so much market power that it's not realistic for smaller business to compete with them even if they provide a potentially more valuable service to some customers of the behemoth. One has to abide by the rules of these market giants. Example: Amazon competing with its sellers on its own marketplace, they can simply price dump their competitors since they don't have to pay a merchant fee to themselves, they can extract the data about best selling products and create an Amazon Basics version of it that will inevitably be cheaper than their competition. That's not a fair market practice. Another example: Apple can bundle their services and sell through the App Store without paying the 30% fee to themselves, inevitably making their products more profitable (and potentially cheaper) than the competition simply because they are a gatekeeper. > The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. No, you are a small fish, you don't exert so much power in the market, it's not about you, it's about a very different league of business than you are. I think that's the part you don't understand, with different sizes probably it's best to have different rules because of how much power they can hold, you are trying to apply a simple model very broadly when it's not how real markets work. Even if you don't agree with Yanis Varoufakis I thoroughly recommend reading "Technofeudalism" to get some insights, at least to challenge the thesis, it's worth a read to understand what happens when these companies become gatekeepers creating their own fiefdoms.