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The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often co

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the market where once a company gets x% market share, the company 'wins', the CEO gets the ability to run for high office, the nation thanks shareholders and gives them a big payoff for supporting innovation, and those 1 run down the food chain get to spin off their own companies and go for gold. Life and death is a part of everything sustainable in life. We should embrace these cycles and utilise them, not let old hat stagnation strangle and squeeze all what's good from life.

4star3star 2y ago
It would become a game to NOT capture x% market share to the degree that it suited interested parties to avoid it.
- gmueckl 2y ago
  That would have interesting implications. Companies would have to grow by aggressive diversification into other markets. Instead of a Google or Appple that controls your digital life, you'd have an endgame with a few ACMEs that attempt to lock you in in every aspect of your life: Your pots would work best with a stove from the same company. Your washing machine and detergent only do a good on a specific brand of clothes etc. A completely different kind of market regulation would be required.
- grumpy_coder 2y ago
  That game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction sets and the like.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
What happens to the company when it wins in your scenario. Did you leave that out or did I miss something?
randomdata 2y ago
> The free market's great IF there's competition. If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation. To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition. Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.
svara 2y ago
Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Why can't that be right? I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.
  - svara 2y ago
    Exactly, it's "just" the market setting the price. The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient. In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation. That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo. But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I think that's exactly the point I was getting it. Who decides what efficient is, and what do they measure. You might care about vision algorithms, and I might care about hamburgers. From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly doesn't mean it's inefficient. Depending on the situation, they can be far more efficient then diverse companies, or much less
      - 2y ago
akira2501 2y ago
> Scale's great Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.
- black_puppydog 2y ago
  I think that's exactly because too much of a good thing became bad. Scale was good for consumers when it increased efficiency, and decreased cost. But once the lower hanging scale effects were taken, the drawbacks (regulatory capture, monopoly,...) became more noticeable.
makeitdouble 2y ago
I think you're partly describing nationalisation of a business when it becomes so big it can't be left alone and needs to be readjusted to help the market. It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate. We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.
- eric-hu 2y ago
  > godlike technofeudalism Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms. Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)
  - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Every entity with any weight to throw around in a geopolitical sense wants an omniscient and omnipotent surveillance state, which necessarily becomes a fusion of government and corporate power, even if it was not done intentionally. They've always wanted it, it's just that now it doesn't seem like a fantasy, but rather a reality a decade away. Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law. If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another. The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.
hot_gril 2y ago
If the tech market is dead, most markets are even more dead
snarf21 2y ago
I think you are close, but we need to stop these mega-mergers where the acquisition would give any company X% of the market. We also need to go after the anti-monopoly practices of the mega giants; like what Amazon did to Diapers.com. As we've seen through the pandemic and elsewhere, extreme consolidation is only good for shareholders and more rent-seeking. It is never good for workers or the market or competition. It has affected everything from food to energy to "news" to healthcare.

4star3star 2y ago

It would become a game to NOT capture x% market share to the degree that it suited interested parties to avoid it.

gmueckl 2y ago
That would have interesting implications. Companies would have to grow by aggressive diversification into other markets. Instead of a Google or Appple that controls your digital life, you'd have an endgame with a few ACMEs that attempt to lock you in in every aspect of your life: Your pots would work best with a stove from the same company. Your washing machine and detergent only do a good on a specific brand of clothes etc. A completely different kind of market regulation would be required.
grumpy_coder 2y ago
That game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction sets and the like.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

What happens to the company when it wins in your scenario. Did you leave that out or did I miss something?

randomdata 2y ago

> The free market's great IF there's competition. If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation. To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition. Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.

svara 2y ago

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
Why can't that be right? I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.
- svara 2y ago
  Exactly, it's "just" the market setting the price. The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient. In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation. That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo. But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I think that's exactly the point I was getting it. Who decides what efficient is, and what do they measure. You might care about vision algorithms, and I might care about hamburgers. From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly doesn't mean it's inefficient. Depending on the situation, they can be far more efficient then diverse companies, or much less
    - 2y ago

akira2501 2y ago

> Scale's great Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.

black_puppydog 2y ago
I think that's exactly because too much of a good thing became bad. Scale was good for consumers when it increased efficiency, and decreased cost. But once the lower hanging scale effects were taken, the drawbacks (regulatory capture, monopoly,...) became more noticeable.

makeitdouble 2y ago

I think you're partly describing nationalisation of a business when it becomes so big it can't be left alone and needs to be readjusted to help the market. It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate. We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.

eric-hu 2y ago
> godlike technofeudalism Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms. Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Every entity with any weight to throw around in a geopolitical sense wants an omniscient and omnipotent surveillance state, which necessarily becomes a fusion of government and corporate power, even if it was not done intentionally. They've always wanted it, it's just that now it doesn't seem like a fantasy, but rather a reality a decade away. Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law. If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another. The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.

hot_gril 2y ago

If the tech market is dead, most markets are even more dead

snarf21 2y ago

I think you are close, but we need to stop these mega-mergers where the acquisition would give any company X% of the market. We also need to go after the anti-monopoly practices of the mega giants; like what Amazon did to Diapers.com. As we've seen through the pandemic and elsewhere, extreme consolidation is only good for shareholders and more rent-seeking. It is never good for workers or the market or competition. It has affected everything from food to energy to "news" to healthcare.