5 ms·

The Antitrust Revolution

65 points by pseudolus 2y ago

decremental 2y ago
[dead]
christhecaribou 2y ago
All of the Big Tech companies should be split up. Every single one.
- EGreg 2y ago
  And then what? Ma Bell was split up, and longn distance calls still cost $3 a minute for decades. Then Voice over IP took the cost down to near-zero practically overnight. The key is in an open and permissionless technological alternative.
  - alwayslikethis 2y ago
    Most of big tech doesn't have much of a monopoly on the technology. They have a monopoly on network lock-in. If you split them up, they have no monopoly and competition can resume.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      Phone companies were for years considered the dictionary example of a “natural monopoly” because of the network effect. I’m actually old enough to remember when you could call people in AT&T and Verizon network respectively, cheaply, or use phone cards LOL. But call outside the network? You pay. Yes, I agree the government did ONE thing that helped some people and that is pass a law mandating that you could port your phone number between carriers. But no, splitting up Ma Bell into a cartel of phone companies did little to lower the price of phone calls. Technology like Voice Over IP did that overnight. The Web disrupted walled gardens like AOL overnight. Trillions of dollars in value was unlocked with business models like SaaS and e-commerce. Splitting AOL into 5 AOLs wouldn’t do that. The reason Google, Facebook, Amazon and all thr Big Tech companies even were able to get their start (and funding) is because they built on top of the open and permissionless Web! Do you really think AOL or MSN would have allowed a search engine, a social network and a massive global store to grow within their walled garden and not pay then any rent? And they wouldn’t cannibalize them like Twitter did with Periscope and so many other platforms did with their startups? Come on :)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  It frustrates me that we keep wasting time debating what is a monopoly or letting dead end lawsuits play out in the courts over years. The big tech companies will easily avoid consequences under the current framework. We need a totally new set of laws to deal with big corporations. Not only should they be split up, but we need retroactive fines for all of the anti-competitive things they have done. Additionally, I think we need different taxes based on the size of the company and we also need regulations to ban certain practices like rent seeking in app stores or bundling in the case of Microsoft or loss leading when you are a large company. Any business built on network effects should be forced to be interoperable once it is big enough. Finally, we need to recognize that some businesses that are very large are basically as influential as government agencies and as critical as a utility service. These companies should not be operating like a random private entity but should be regulated. As an example, the largest social media companies should be treated like common carriers or utilities.
- dang 2y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
EGreg 2y ago
Lots of industries are very consolidated now, from Banking to Telecom cartels and yes, big tech too. As a libertarian, I propose that in addition to this, we as a developer community also try building good open source software to take on Big Tech, and not simply rely on one giant monolithic thing (Big Government) to save us from another giant thing (the Big Tech oligopoly). Here is how we can take back our communities without waiting for Big Government to rein in Big Tech (which, with Vance and Musk and Google and Facebook and Microsoft & OpenAI, will only capture it more, considering how much they spend on lobbying)… https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ We are lucky that Facebook has open sourced Llama (making lemons out of lemonade after that fiasco with the researchers leaking the weights). Imagine if they didn’t. Would breaking up OpenAI and Google DeepMind into smaller companies somehow help the little guy? They broke up Ma Bell DECADES AGO and long distance calls still cost $3 a minute. Why? It is only when open protocols for VoIP came out did the cost drop to near 0 overnight. Open and permissionless protocols like SMTP and HTTP were the reason that the walls of AOL, MSN, Compuserve and other walled gardens fell. Not any government action. AOL open sourcing netscape is the reason we even got Mozilla Firefox and competition to Microsoft’s browser monopoly which they got with their “embrace, extend, exintnguish” strategy. There WAS an antitrust case against Microsoft. But it was the presence of viable open source competition to their internet browser that was far more important. Konqueror led to WebKit, which led to Safari and then Chrome. Firefox was always there as well. This stuff matters. Government antritrust by itself won’t save you from the problems of Big Tech.
- dartos 2y ago
  Anyone can use open source, including large companies… so open source doesn’t fight against them. _also_ much of what is needed for core infrastructure is hardware, which will pretty much always end up being centralized as it’s expensive to lay fiber optic lines. Also, Llama is not open source. You can’t open source model weights, they’re just freeware. And it has a commercial restriction in its usage license… IMO the fix for this is actually more government. Internet infrastructure should be a utility, ideally with an optional state run infrastructure, so that anyone can have internet access.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
Save the internet and smash the tech industry to pieces. Beer in America got much better when they made it easier for small breweries to compete
- Isamu 2y ago
  Yeah competition improved the beer landscape. But that was accomplished not by smashing big beer. I think we can do a lot better without a heavy hand.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Like how? Beer is different than tech. Not everyone has instant access to the vast majority of beer in their pocket.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      I have access to all of the beer that is currently in my pocket. Sadly, there is none.
bbor 2y ago
Ok I love the thesis in the title but the framing’s kinda silly — comes off as dramatic libertarian stuff more than a sober analysis. This doesn’t help: But even after this decision, the executive bears little resemblance to James’s system of power. In a second Trump term, we might reasonably expect chaos, paralysis, and destruction. But a carefully calibrated cosmos of power? Hardly.
ilaksh 2y ago
The answer to "fighting" technology is for government to adapt and properly integrate up-to-date technologies. A software registry model could work for common decentralized protocols. You need decentralization technology to be able to compete with the Amazons and Googles. The trick is, as with software package registries, you don't prescribe a certain package or protocol, you just ensure that there is a convenient way to install packages. Part of it could literally be based on existing packages registries and decentralized systems like PyPi, IPFS, blockchains, etc. Take Amazon for example. Government would say that, for example, every product for sale has to be listed in some kind of decentralized index that is not effectively controlled by a small number of companies. Government doesn't need to prescribe which ones, let the market decide and have it keep evolving. But we can't let Amazon become a centralized database for everything. Look into things like ActivityPub, Zora, Origin Protocol, IPFS, the new Freenet, blockchains in general. You can still build business on top of protocols and get added value without locking into single company controlling transactions or databases.
Terr_ 2y ago
Tangentially related: How can we steer technology towards empowering individuals instead of exploiting them? Thirty years ago, I was optimistic that personal devices and software were a kind of capital, like power-tools, which was spreading out to allow people to better themselves and their lives... But nowadays it feels more like nets being cast by some (decidedly un-biblical) fishers of men, where it's all about ensnaring customers and holding their data and social-webs hostage, sometimes even fostering gambling addictions. So while I do want to see some (near-)monopolies disrupted, it won't be a panacea: We'll still have important systemic problems to face, such as the terrible DMCA, clickwrap contracts of adhesion, issues around "right to repair", and how advertising/spyware as a revenue stream slowly corrupts everything it touches.
- throwaway13337 2y ago
  This is the most important thing. Tools should be in control of their owners. If not, the owner becomes the tool of those that control them. Old computing had a very philosophical bend this way - the open source movement was about empowering individuals. I don't think that's coming back - at least not in a non-cynical version. A new thought has to exist. Old tech companies had a business model of selling a product to a customer. The change occurred with advertising. It's now the core business of the biggest tech companies. With that, the perspective of how to be successful as a tech company changed. Manipulating the customer through marketing, suggesting, and nudging is now the model. When manipulation is your business model, you're no longer improving the world. How do we get back to aligning companies with their customers? It's not fate that manipulation dominates. It's just one business model. And probably not the greatest one.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    > Tools should be in control of their owners. If not, the owner becomes the tool of those that control them. This is literally the reason why Stallman created FSF and promoted free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Devices running free software obey the users, not the corporation.
- 2y ago
rustcleaner 2y ago
Maybe a fat sales tax (20%? 33%? 100%?) at final point of sale for consumer devices containing at least one Universal machine which executes stored code (it's not an ASIC), where the device owner (principally the one "purchasing" the device to "own" in a normal sense in the year 1800) cannot change the code due to some additional artifical means of preventing it (mainly by cryptographic signature check with a public key which can't be changed). A 100% tax would mean double price on your Xbox, your smart TV, your Apple devices, your medical devices like CPAP, your microwaves, your automobiles, etc. Why? Because we need to make open hardware (and by extension open software) a standard cultural principle in The West, and we need to make closed source prohibitively expensive. Because it is a back-door way to intentionally construct ways of extracting maximum cashflow from customers rather than make it maximally cheap for them (printer mfg is notorious here). Because abandoned vulnerable unpatchable hardware is a national security concern and you are a supreme asshole for telling the poor to throw out their 15 year old otherwise perfectly working TV because you[r employer] want to churn them for more money faster. Also profits from "services" should be hit with fat taxes after write-offs but before dividends and buybacks while going easy on manufacturing, so we become materially rich again rather than gaslit into buying vapors with our real efforts! Rentierism is out of control, the ISM services sector needs to run sub-50 while manufacturing hits 70 for a couple years to fix this societal imbalance!
- EGreg 2y ago
  Not to be the nitpick guy, but you meant 50% tax is double the price. 100% tax is simply taking ALL YOUR MONEY lol
  - alwayslikethis 2y ago
    Sales tax is added to the price. 50% means to add 50 cents for every dollar you pay. 100% is double price.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      50% tax on income, for instance, is taking half the money from your income.
woanversace 2y ago
Throughout human history, have there been any periods or times when an organization was led by the majority? Or has there always been a need for a king? Democracy is a sham, especially in a capitalist system, a system that sees personal interests and money as the only important things.
wavemode 2y ago
It feels like there's a strong thesis and well-reasoned argument here, but it's hidden within a forest of flashbacks and flowery metaphors. Very core to the author's argument, it seems, is the idea that the Reagan and Clinton administrations caused the proliferation of modern monopolies, but no more than a few paragraphs is spent discussing this. I think this article would have benefited from more detailed research into the effects of their economic policies, and less detailed research on King James I.
cryptica 2y ago
My theory of politics is that it runs in cycles. Each cycle sees a reversal of roles whereby the oppressors become comfortable and thus become kinder and fairer... At this point they are taken advantage of by the previously oppressed class. Hence the oppressed become the oppressors and the cycle repeats. This is a similar idea as the fourth turning "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." But it also works if you substitute the word 'weak' with words such as 'kind', 'fair' or 'just'. I think this explains why humanity has repeatedly failed to achieve anything close to universal justice; every time the oppressed rise up, they do so vengefully and unjustly; and they create new future enemies for themselves. The worst aspect of this is that there seems to be a subset of oppressors who manage to retain power through multiple cycles and they often achieve this by being particularly greedy, ruthless or deceitful. But who knows, maybe they're just operating on a longer cycle? The past has a way of catching up. We should try hard to identify and correct injustices that we may be unwittingly perpetrating onto others as it creates hidden enemies. These are the worst kinds of enemies because you may view them as your friends. You may not realize their true disposition until they've backstabbed you. It's easy to radicalize an oppressed person. You just need to give them a compelling narrative which explains how they've been oppressed. Oppressed people are often desperate for narratives to explain the multitude of negative internal feelings that they and/or their ancestors have accumulated as a result of decades or centuries of oppression.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > This is a similar idea as the fourth turning "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Ah, but does that pattern really happen in history, or is it just a recurrent trope, like how a hundred generations of elderly people each keep claiming "youths have no manners anymore"? To quote from the intro to a lengthy piece [0] on the subject: > This complex of ideas is what I phrase as the Fremen Mirage, and as you might imagine from that word ‘mirage,’ there are real, gaping problems in this vision of history. [0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

65 points by pseudolus 2y ago

decremental 2y ago

[dead]

christhecaribou 2y ago

All of the Big Tech companies should be split up. Every single one.

EGreg 2y ago
And then what? Ma Bell was split up, and longn distance calls still cost $3 a minute for decades. Then Voice over IP took the cost down to near-zero practically overnight. The key is in an open and permissionless technological alternative.
- alwayslikethis 2y ago
  Most of big tech doesn't have much of a monopoly on the technology. They have a monopoly on network lock-in. If you split them up, they have no monopoly and competition can resume.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Phone companies were for years considered the dictionary example of a “natural monopoly” because of the network effect. I’m actually old enough to remember when you could call people in AT&T and Verizon network respectively, cheaply, or use phone cards LOL. But call outside the network? You pay. Yes, I agree the government did ONE thing that helped some people and that is pass a law mandating that you could port your phone number between carriers. But no, splitting up Ma Bell into a cartel of phone companies did little to lower the price of phone calls. Technology like Voice Over IP did that overnight. The Web disrupted walled gardens like AOL overnight. Trillions of dollars in value was unlocked with business models like SaaS and e-commerce. Splitting AOL into 5 AOLs wouldn’t do that. The reason Google, Facebook, Amazon and all thr Big Tech companies even were able to get their start (and funding) is because they built on top of the open and permissionless Web! Do you really think AOL or MSN would have allowed a search engine, a social network and a massive global store to grow within their walled garden and not pay then any rent? And they wouldn’t cannibalize them like Twitter did with Periscope and so many other platforms did with their startups? Come on :)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It frustrates me that we keep wasting time debating what is a monopoly or letting dead end lawsuits play out in the courts over years. The big tech companies will easily avoid consequences under the current framework. We need a totally new set of laws to deal with big corporations. Not only should they be split up, but we need retroactive fines for all of the anti-competitive things they have done. Additionally, I think we need different taxes based on the size of the company and we also need regulations to ban certain practices like rent seeking in app stores or bundling in the case of Microsoft or loss leading when you are a large company. Any business built on network effects should be forced to be interoperable once it is big enough. Finally, we need to recognize that some businesses that are very large are basically as influential as government agencies and as critical as a utility service. These companies should not be operating like a random private entity but should be regulated. As an example, the largest social media companies should be treated like common carriers or utilities.
dang 2y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

EGreg 2y ago

Lots of industries are very consolidated now, from Banking to Telecom cartels and yes, big tech too. As a libertarian, I propose that in addition to this, we as a developer community also try building good open source software to take on Big Tech, and not simply rely on one giant monolithic thing (Big Government) to save us from another giant thing (the Big Tech oligopoly). Here is how we can take back our communities without waiting for Big Government to rein in Big Tech (which, with Vance and Musk and Google and Facebook and Microsoft & OpenAI, will only capture it more, considering how much they spend on lobbying)… https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ We are lucky that Facebook has open sourced Llama (making lemons out of lemonade after that fiasco with the researchers leaking the weights). Imagine if they didn’t. Would breaking up OpenAI and Google DeepMind into smaller companies somehow help the little guy? They broke up Ma Bell DECADES AGO and long distance calls still cost $3 a minute. Why? It is only when open protocols for VoIP came out did the cost drop to near 0 overnight. Open and permissionless protocols like SMTP and HTTP were the reason that the walls of AOL, MSN, Compuserve and other walled gardens fell. Not any government action. AOL open sourcing netscape is the reason we even got Mozilla Firefox and competition to Microsoft’s browser monopoly which they got with their “embrace, extend, exintnguish” strategy. There WAS an antitrust case against Microsoft. But it was the presence of viable open source competition to their internet browser that was far more important. Konqueror led to WebKit, which led to Safari and then Chrome. Firefox was always there as well. This stuff matters. Government antritrust by itself won’t save you from the problems of Big Tech.

dartos 2y ago
Anyone can use open source, including large companies… so open source doesn’t fight against them. _also_ much of what is needed for core infrastructure is hardware, which will pretty much always end up being centralized as it’s expensive to lay fiber optic lines. Also, Llama is not open source. You can’t open source model weights, they’re just freeware. And it has a commercial restriction in its usage license… IMO the fix for this is actually more government. Internet infrastructure should be a utility, ideally with an optional state run infrastructure, so that anyone can have internet access.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

Save the internet and smash the tech industry to pieces. Beer in America got much better when they made it easier for small breweries to compete

Isamu 2y ago
Yeah competition improved the beer landscape. But that was accomplished not by smashing big beer. I think we can do a lot better without a heavy hand.
- dartos 2y ago
  Like how? Beer is different than tech. Not everyone has instant access to the vast majority of beer in their pocket.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I have access to all of the beer that is currently in my pocket. Sadly, there is none.

bbor 2y ago

Ok I love the thesis in the title but the framing’s kinda silly — comes off as dramatic libertarian stuff more than a sober analysis. This doesn’t help: But even after this decision, the executive bears little resemblance to James’s system of power. In a second Trump term, we might reasonably expect chaos, paralysis, and destruction. But a carefully calibrated cosmos of power? Hardly.

ilaksh 2y ago

The answer to "fighting" technology is for government to adapt and properly integrate up-to-date technologies. A software registry model could work for common decentralized protocols. You need decentralization technology to be able to compete with the Amazons and Googles. The trick is, as with software package registries, you don't prescribe a certain package or protocol, you just ensure that there is a convenient way to install packages. Part of it could literally be based on existing packages registries and decentralized systems like PyPi, IPFS, blockchains, etc. Take Amazon for example. Government would say that, for example, every product for sale has to be listed in some kind of decentralized index that is not effectively controlled by a small number of companies. Government doesn't need to prescribe which ones, let the market decide and have it keep evolving. But we can't let Amazon become a centralized database for everything. Look into things like ActivityPub, Zora, Origin Protocol, IPFS, the new Freenet, blockchains in general. You can still build business on top of protocols and get added value without locking into single company controlling transactions or databases.

Terr_ 2y ago

Tangentially related: How can we steer technology towards empowering individuals instead of exploiting them? Thirty years ago, I was optimistic that personal devices and software were a kind of capital, like power-tools, which was spreading out to allow people to better themselves and their lives... But nowadays it feels more like nets being cast by some (decidedly un-biblical) fishers of men, where it's all about ensnaring customers and holding their data and social-webs hostage, sometimes even fostering gambling addictions. So while I do want to see some (near-)monopolies disrupted, it won't be a panacea: We'll still have important systemic problems to face, such as the terrible DMCA, clickwrap contracts of adhesion, issues around "right to repair", and how advertising/spyware as a revenue stream slowly corrupts everything it touches.

throwaway13337 2y ago
This is the most important thing. Tools should be in control of their owners. If not, the owner becomes the tool of those that control them. Old computing had a very philosophical bend this way - the open source movement was about empowering individuals. I don't think that's coming back - at least not in a non-cynical version. A new thought has to exist. Old tech companies had a business model of selling a product to a customer. The change occurred with advertising. It's now the core business of the biggest tech companies. With that, the perspective of how to be successful as a tech company changed. Manipulating the customer through marketing, suggesting, and nudging is now the model. When manipulation is your business model, you're no longer improving the world. How do we get back to aligning companies with their customers? It's not fate that manipulation dominates. It's just one business model. And probably not the greatest one.
- fsflover 2y ago
  > Tools should be in control of their owners. If not, the owner becomes the tool of those that control them. This is literally the reason why Stallman created FSF and promoted free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Devices running free software obey the users, not the corporation.
2y ago

rustcleaner 2y ago

Maybe a fat sales tax (20%? 33%? 100%?) at final point of sale for consumer devices containing at least one Universal machine which executes stored code (it's not an ASIC), where the device owner (principally the one "purchasing" the device to "own" in a normal sense in the year 1800) cannot change the code due to some additional artifical means of preventing it (mainly by cryptographic signature check with a public key which can't be changed). A 100% tax would mean double price on your Xbox, your smart TV, your Apple devices, your medical devices like CPAP, your microwaves, your automobiles, etc. Why? Because we need to make open hardware (and by extension open software) a standard cultural principle in The West, and we need to make closed source prohibitively expensive. Because it is a back-door way to intentionally construct ways of extracting maximum cashflow from customers rather than make it maximally cheap for them (printer mfg is notorious here). Because abandoned vulnerable unpatchable hardware is a national security concern and you are a supreme asshole for telling the poor to throw out their 15 year old otherwise perfectly working TV because you[r employer] want to churn them for more money faster. Also profits from "services" should be hit with fat taxes after write-offs but before dividends and buybacks while going easy on manufacturing, so we become materially rich again rather than gaslit into buying vapors with our real efforts! Rentierism is out of control, the ISM services sector needs to run sub-50 while manufacturing hits 70 for a couple years to fix this societal imbalance!

EGreg 2y ago
Not to be the nitpick guy, but you meant 50% tax is double the price. 100% tax is simply taking ALL YOUR MONEY lol
- alwayslikethis 2y ago
  Sales tax is added to the price. 50% means to add 50 cents for every dollar you pay. 100% is double price.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    50% tax on income, for instance, is taking half the money from your income.

woanversace 2y ago

Throughout human history, have there been any periods or times when an organization was led by the majority? Or has there always been a need for a king? Democracy is a sham, especially in a capitalist system, a system that sees personal interests and money as the only important things.

wavemode 2y ago

It feels like there's a strong thesis and well-reasoned argument here, but it's hidden within a forest of flashbacks and flowery metaphors. Very core to the author's argument, it seems, is the idea that the Reagan and Clinton administrations caused the proliferation of modern monopolies, but no more than a few paragraphs is spent discussing this. I think this article would have benefited from more detailed research into the effects of their economic policies, and less detailed research on King James I.

cryptica 2y ago

My theory of politics is that it runs in cycles. Each cycle sees a reversal of roles whereby the oppressors become comfortable and thus become kinder and fairer... At this point they are taken advantage of by the previously oppressed class. Hence the oppressed become the oppressors and the cycle repeats. This is a similar idea as the fourth turning "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." But it also works if you substitute the word 'weak' with words such as 'kind', 'fair' or 'just'. I think this explains why humanity has repeatedly failed to achieve anything close to universal justice; every time the oppressed rise up, they do so vengefully and unjustly; and they create new future enemies for themselves. The worst aspect of this is that there seems to be a subset of oppressors who manage to retain power through multiple cycles and they often achieve this by being particularly greedy, ruthless or deceitful. But who knows, maybe they're just operating on a longer cycle? The past has a way of catching up. We should try hard to identify and correct injustices that we may be unwittingly perpetrating onto others as it creates hidden enemies. These are the worst kinds of enemies because you may view them as your friends. You may not realize their true disposition until they've backstabbed you. It's easy to radicalize an oppressed person. You just need to give them a compelling narrative which explains how they've been oppressed. Oppressed people are often desperate for narratives to explain the multitude of negative internal feelings that they and/or their ancestors have accumulated as a result of decades or centuries of oppression.

Terr_ 2y ago
> This is a similar idea as the fourth turning "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Ah, but does that pattern really happen in history, or is it just a recurrent trope, like how a hundred generations of elderly people each keep claiming "youths have no manners anymore"? To quote from the intro to a lengthy piece [0] on the subject: > This complex of ideas is what I phrase as the Fremen Mirage, and as you might imagine from that word ‘mirage,’ there are real, gaping problems in this vision of history. [0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...