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"I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their po

"I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their power must be curtailed." That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech". It shows up in "tech" because "tech" scales so well and has such strong network effects. But the US's tolerance of monopoly is the real cause. There need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. The US has three big banks, two big drugstore chains, etc. Tough antitrust enforcement would help. Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. Tough labor law enforcement would help. No more "gig worker" jobs that are exempt from labor law. No more "wage shaving". No more unpaid overtime. Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance. A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I think an under-discussed issue is how companies are allowed to own sub-companies that don't need to necessarily disclose they're owned by a larger conglomerate. Like I don't know how you necessarily solve this, but I think if people, for example, knew the sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco, there would be a lot more discussion about corporate consolidation and monopolies.
- Animats 2y ago
  > sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco Also Yum and Roark, which, together, own much of fast food.
WalterBright 2y ago
> Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars. Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that. > A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps. That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce. > Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. Google is already in trouble because AI is disrupting their search/advertisement business model. I'd be careful about destroying big business. The US is only part of the world. Destroying US big business means other countries will have those companies, and it's lose lose for the US. Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce. Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business. Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is. > Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies? This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
  - ghshephard 2y ago
    > Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. There was a time in the not so distant past, that close to 100% of those "Minimum Wage" jobs were held by teenagers and youths with close to zero market value as employees, who needed their first few jobs to develop the skills, knowledge, resume and references so they could get an actual job. Places like McDonalds and Summer Resorts and Amusement parks - were great places for youth to learn these skills. The real distortion is when you started having adults working in McDonalds. It was never a job to support a family - it was a minimum-wage job for kids to get started.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      This is just historically inaccurate (and a regrettably common claim among older conservative-ish folk. Those "minimum wage" jobs that you had a teenager in the 1950-1986 time period? They paid more than minimum wage does now, on an inflation adjusted basis. That $2/hr job in 1962 would be paying $21/hr if it had kept up with CPI. That's the whole reason why adults started working in them. Over time, federal minimum wage did not keep up even with national inflation rates, let alone regional cost of living changes. The result is that these employers, who were once forced to pay even their lowest level employees a living wage, can avoid paying even that.
      - grayhatter 2y ago
narski 2y ago
>Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads. Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?
from-nibly 2y ago
Having monopolies is not a symptom of government negligence. It's the system working as intended.
dmoy 2y ago
> The US has three big banks ? I thought we still had the big four? Chase, BoA, Citi, WF? And if you're talking about just consumer banking, US Bank is only ~30% behind #4 (Citi).
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The US also has a relatively huge amount of small banks that are specialized in financing niches. It’s actually a huge competitive advantage. If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider. The flip side is that big banks are great at driving down costs for standard operations (when there are enough of them to be competitive). If all I need is a business checking account as a consultant, I can access that for no cost via one of the giants.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    > If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider. What's the specialty here, risk assessment?
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      Niche risk assessment. Or more generically knowing the industry. Small banks with a specialty will have loan officers that deeply understand the industry they specialize in and are able to parse a bad deal from a good one. If a fishing captain comes in and wants to borrow $75k to replace an engine, that could be a great loan to make or a terrible one depending on factors that require knowledge of boats and the fishing industry. If this captain was paid out $150k last season, the hull has a clean survey and this season has a higher harvest quota, it’s a good deal. If the hull is a floating wreck, and the fishery is likely to be closed or contract this season, don’t make the deal. Bank of America does not have a loan officer who knows how to read a commercial vessel hull survey, or who understands local fishing payout customs, nor is it really worth their time to find that person. A bank that has that knowledge has a competitive edge over banks that don’t. The captains in the fleet all know of that bank, and so do the diesel engine dealers. In the US, for many industries, there is a bank that maintains that competitive edge, and most of the time it is a bank that you have never heard of. This isn’t hypothetical, if you want the loan I’m talking about you probably will end up on the phone with these people: https://www.peoplesbank-wa.com/business/loans-lines-of-credit/maritime-loans/ https://www.peoplesbank-wa.com/business/loans-lines-of-credi...
oooyay 2y ago
The hyperfocus on shareholder returns is also worth mentioning. It's tangentially related to a monopolistic trajectory. Instead of a company being really good at solving problems in a particular domain they attempt to serve many mediocre solutions in a variety of domains. Shareholders, VCs, and the like encourage this lack of focus on quality and replace it with a focus on margins. The solution for low margins is lower head count and greater diversification of SKUs. For many companies, it's a recipe for enshittification and spirals into mediocrity. Not to mention, when a company enters this phase the lives of employees begin to suffer greatly.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. Why Google? Every single day there are articles here on HN with many comments explaining that Google is done due to LLMs replacing search. Google market cap: $2.3 bn Microsoft market cap: $3.2 bn Break up Microsoft. And for good this time.
- makapuf 2y ago
  You mean trillions, not billions
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> There need to be about four major players before markets push prices dow Not at all sure that prices are the problem here, nor that markets can solve the actual problems.
nox101 2y ago
Apple should also be broken up into hardware/os, app store, services, payments, media Your car shouldn't decide who you can do business with nor should it get a fee from every store you drive to. It shouldn't push it's own payment system for all purchases. And neither should a pocket computer do these things
timoth3y 2y ago
> "I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other > way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their > power must be curtailed." > That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech". If you wound enjoy a deep and rigorous treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." He argues that modern technology is fundamentally different from historical technology, and that corporatism and monopoly are the inevitable result of technology.
cbsmith 2y ago
> That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech". There is a general problem with corporatism and monopoly, but there are also specific problems with "tech". Oil & gas monopolies don't broadly carry everyone's private interactions. Sports monopolies generally can't expose political dissidents.
kortilla 2y ago
This is a Gish Gallop of completely unrelated things. Tech companies can become very powerful without holding a monopoly. All it takes is being big enough to have political sway either through being a big employer or just by straight up lobbying. The US has a few big banks and then hundreds of regional banks. It’s trivial to bank without using the big ones. Prohibiting a post breakup Google from contracting with each other is completely idiotic. Either they make sense as standalone businesses or they don’t. Why wouldn’t Google search be allowed to use GCP but be allows to use AWS? If they are different companies they will use what is best for the company and regulating that they use something worse is bad for everyone. Min wage unrelated Gig job unrelated Medical insurance unrelated
jonstewart 2y ago
Antitrust enforcement is so hit-or-miss, contingent upon risky prosecution in court and a DOJ willing to undertake it, and with no ability to scale. It has made me wonder whether a statutory approach may be better, where companies past a certain [relative] size threshold would need to split up. Then it would be no surprise to shareholders and consumers wouldn’t need to be harmed for years before maybe regulators would dare step in. I think it would do a lot for the US competitively, too, to ensure the market remains dynamic. Sustained vigorous competition seems likelier to serve us better in the long run than boosterism of our largest companies.
jmyeet 2y ago
Empires tend to have defining characteristics that are both the reason they become empires in the first place and ultimately what is their undoing. The British Empire was the drug dealer empire (first tobacco then opium). The US is the arms dealer empire, at least since WWI. The point here is that I believe that any sufficiently large company in the US eventually becomes a defense contractor and thus aligns itself with US foreign policy [1]. So we have Amazon selling cloud services to the CIA, Google selling cloud services to the military and Israel, Meta cooperating with military uses of AI and so on. [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alliance-pentagon https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alli...
tomjen3 2y ago
It is an even more generic problem than that since it also applies to bureaucracy and by extension the government. While I agree with you on the basic issue of monopolies, I think the biggest monopoly problem is the U.S. government. It's so massive that it absolutely dwarfs all other monopolies, like Google. I would therefore like a solution that does not, in any way whatsoever, increase the power of the US government.
skirge 2y ago
Monopolies in US? Which bad product you are forced to buy because there's no competition at all?
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I disagree. It's a problem with tech because even if regulations exist, new tech moves much faster than regulation. And technology is too seductive to be used properly so people indeed end up serving tech just as drug addicts live for their habit. Many more details are explained in "The Metaphysics of Technology" by David Skrbina or "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul. Technology has a tendency to overwhelm and transform everything for the sake of technology.
robertlagrant 2y ago
What's that got to do with corporatism?
vlovich123 2y ago
The US cellular market has T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and a bunch of mvnos. Dish is starting out and a few years back we had Sprint before it merged with TMobile. I wouldn’t say the competitiveness changed all that much and I would say it’s more competitive than Canada with also 3 and less competitive than France with 4. However the competitiveness in France now is specifically because a low cost provider Free entered and started stealing all the costumers rather than because of the number of competitors.
specialist 2y ago
> corporatism and monopoly, not "tech" Yes and: Corporatocracy > strong network effects Yes and: aka Preferential attachment leading to winner-takes-all. It's just math. Not some kind of weird moralistic blather. The tendency towards concentration necessitates some counter balance, backpressure, redistribution, whatever. > need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. Yes and: I believe, but cannot prove, unifying markets (nationalization, globalization) accelerated monopolization. Alas, I don't have any ideas on how to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Clearly, we're not reverting to regionalism or localism any time soon. Economically or politically.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

I think an under-discussed issue is how companies are allowed to own sub-companies that don't need to necessarily disclose they're owned by a larger conglomerate. Like I don't know how you necessarily solve this, but I think if people, for example, knew the sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco, there would be a lot more discussion about corporate consolidation and monopolies.

Animats 2y ago
> sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco Also Yum and Roark, which, together, own much of fast food.

WalterBright 2y ago

> Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars. Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that. > A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps. That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce. > Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. Google is already in trouble because AI is disrupting their search/advertisement business model. I'd be careful about destroying big business. The US is only part of the world. Destroying US big business means other countries will have those companies, and it's lose lose for the US. Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce. Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business. Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is. > Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies? This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
- ghshephard 2y ago
  > Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. There was a time in the not so distant past, that close to 100% of those "Minimum Wage" jobs were held by teenagers and youths with close to zero market value as employees, who needed their first few jobs to develop the skills, knowledge, resume and references so they could get an actual job. Places like McDonalds and Summer Resorts and Amusement parks - were great places for youth to learn these skills. The real distortion is when you started having adults working in McDonalds. It was never a job to support a family - it was a minimum-wage job for kids to get started.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    This is just historically inaccurate (and a regrettably common claim among older conservative-ish folk. Those "minimum wage" jobs that you had a teenager in the 1950-1986 time period? They paid more than minimum wage does now, on an inflation adjusted basis. That $2/hr job in 1962 would be paying $21/hr if it had kept up with CPI. That's the whole reason why adults started working in them. Over time, federal minimum wage did not keep up even with national inflation rates, let alone regional cost of living changes. The result is that these employers, who were once forced to pay even their lowest level employees a living wage, can avoid paying even that.
    - grayhatter 2y ago

narski 2y ago

>Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads. Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?

from-nibly 2y ago

Having monopolies is not a symptom of government negligence. It's the system working as intended.

dmoy 2y ago

> The US has three big banks ? I thought we still had the big four? Chase, BoA, Citi, WF? And if you're talking about just consumer banking, US Bank is only ~30% behind #4 (Citi).

dghlsakjg 2y ago
The US also has a relatively huge amount of small banks that are specialized in financing niches. It’s actually a huge competitive advantage. If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider. The flip side is that big banks are great at driving down costs for standard operations (when there are enough of them to be competitive). If all I need is a business checking account as a consultant, I can access that for no cost via one of the giants.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  > If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider. What's the specialty here, risk assessment?
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    Niche risk assessment. Or more generically knowing the industry. Small banks with a specialty will have loan officers that deeply understand the industry they specialize in and are able to parse a bad deal from a good one. If a fishing captain comes in and wants to borrow $75k to replace an engine, that could be a great loan to make or a terrible one depending on factors that require knowledge of boats and the fishing industry. If this captain was paid out $150k last season, the hull has a clean survey and this season has a higher harvest quota, it’s a good deal. If the hull is a floating wreck, and the fishery is likely to be closed or contract this season, don’t make the deal. Bank of America does not have a loan officer who knows how to read a commercial vessel hull survey, or who understands local fishing payout customs, nor is it really worth their time to find that person. A bank that has that knowledge has a competitive edge over banks that don’t. The captains in the fleet all know of that bank, and so do the diesel engine dealers. In the US, for many industries, there is a bank that maintains that competitive edge, and most of the time it is a bank that you have never heard of. This isn’t hypothetical, if you want the loan I’m talking about you probably will end up on the phone with these people: https://www.peoplesbank-wa.com/business/loans-lines-of-credit/maritime-loans/ https://www.peoplesbank-wa.com/business/loans-lines-of-credi...

oooyay 2y ago

The hyperfocus on shareholder returns is also worth mentioning. It's tangentially related to a monopolistic trajectory. Instead of a company being really good at solving problems in a particular domain they attempt to serve many mediocre solutions in a variety of domains. Shareholders, VCs, and the like encourage this lack of focus on quality and replace it with a focus on margins. The solution for low margins is lower head count and greater diversification of SKUs. For many companies, it's a recipe for enshittification and spirals into mediocrity. Not to mention, when a company enters this phase the lives of employees begin to suffer greatly.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other. Why Google? Every single day there are articles here on HN with many comments explaining that Google is done due to LLMs replacing search. Google market cap: $2.3 bn Microsoft market cap: $3.2 bn Break up Microsoft. And for good this time.

makapuf 2y ago
You mean trillions, not billions

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

> There need to be about four major players before markets push prices dow Not at all sure that prices are the problem here, nor that markets can solve the actual problems.

nox101 2y ago

Apple should also be broken up into hardware/os, app store, services, payments, media Your car shouldn't decide who you can do business with nor should it get a fee from every store you drive to. It shouldn't push it's own payment system for all purchases. And neither should a pocket computer do these things

timoth3y 2y ago

> "I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other > way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their > power must be curtailed." > That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech". If you wound enjoy a deep and rigorous treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." He argues that modern technology is fundamentally different from historical technology, and that corporatism and monopoly are the inevitable result of technology.

cbsmith 2y ago

> That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech". There is a general problem with corporatism and monopoly, but there are also specific problems with "tech". Oil & gas monopolies don't broadly carry everyone's private interactions. Sports monopolies generally can't expose political dissidents.

kortilla 2y ago

This is a Gish Gallop of completely unrelated things. Tech companies can become very powerful without holding a monopoly. All it takes is being big enough to have political sway either through being a big employer or just by straight up lobbying. The US has a few big banks and then hundreds of regional banks. It’s trivial to bank without using the big ones. Prohibiting a post breakup Google from contracting with each other is completely idiotic. Either they make sense as standalone businesses or they don’t. Why wouldn’t Google search be allowed to use GCP but be allows to use AWS? If they are different companies they will use what is best for the company and regulating that they use something worse is bad for everyone. Min wage unrelated Gig job unrelated Medical insurance unrelated

jonstewart 2y ago

Antitrust enforcement is so hit-or-miss, contingent upon risky prosecution in court and a DOJ willing to undertake it, and with no ability to scale. It has made me wonder whether a statutory approach may be better, where companies past a certain [relative] size threshold would need to split up. Then it would be no surprise to shareholders and consumers wouldn’t need to be harmed for years before maybe regulators would dare step in. I think it would do a lot for the US competitively, too, to ensure the market remains dynamic. Sustained vigorous competition seems likelier to serve us better in the long run than boosterism of our largest companies.

jmyeet 2y ago

Empires tend to have defining characteristics that are both the reason they become empires in the first place and ultimately what is their undoing. The British Empire was the drug dealer empire (first tobacco then opium). The US is the arms dealer empire, at least since WWI. The point here is that I believe that any sufficiently large company in the US eventually becomes a defense contractor and thus aligns itself with US foreign policy [1]. So we have Amazon selling cloud services to the CIA, Google selling cloud services to the military and Israel, Meta cooperating with military uses of AI and so on. [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alliance-pentagon https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alli...

tomjen3 2y ago

It is an even more generic problem than that since it also applies to bureaucracy and by extension the government. While I agree with you on the basic issue of monopolies, I think the biggest monopoly problem is the U.S. government. It's so massive that it absolutely dwarfs all other monopolies, like Google. I would therefore like a solution that does not, in any way whatsoever, increase the power of the US government.

skirge 2y ago

Monopolies in US? Which bad product you are forced to buy because there's no competition at all?

vouaobrasil 2y ago

I disagree. It's a problem with tech because even if regulations exist, new tech moves much faster than regulation. And technology is too seductive to be used properly so people indeed end up serving tech just as drug addicts live for their habit. Many more details are explained in "The Metaphysics of Technology" by David Skrbina or "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul. Technology has a tendency to overwhelm and transform everything for the sake of technology.

robertlagrant 2y ago

What's that got to do with corporatism?

vlovich123 2y ago

The US cellular market has T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and a bunch of mvnos. Dish is starting out and a few years back we had Sprint before it merged with TMobile. I wouldn’t say the competitiveness changed all that much and I would say it’s more competitive than Canada with also 3 and less competitive than France with 4. However the competitiveness in France now is specifically because a low cost provider Free entered and started stealing all the costumers rather than because of the number of competitors.

specialist 2y ago

> corporatism and monopoly, not "tech" Yes and: Corporatocracy > strong network effects Yes and: aka Preferential attachment leading to winner-takes-all. It's just math. Not some kind of weird moralistic blather. The tendency towards concentration necessitates some counter balance, backpressure, redistribution, whatever. > need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. Yes and: I believe, but cannot prove, unifying markets (nationalization, globalization) accelerated monopolization. Alas, I don't have any ideas on how to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Clearly, we're not reverting to regionalism or localism any time soon. Economically or politically.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]