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Does upholding monopolies help Americans at all? Do not conflate the ballooning wealth of billionaires with any kind of improvement in your material conditions.
by thrance 2y ago
Does upholding monopolies help Americans at all? Do not conflate the ballooning wealth of billionaires with any kind of improvement in your material conditions.
- loeg 2y agoAmericans marginally benefit from American owned monopolies over Chinese owned monopolies.
- thrance 2y agoHow so? They pay almost no taxes, they capture a huge share of the market, they stifle innovation, they regularly engage in anti-user practices... The bottom 90% is owning an ever smaller share of the economy, while the real economy doesn't seem to grow that much.
- ImJamal 2y agoIf a Chinese company has a monopoly you get All those things, minus the US jobs. It seems like you are comparing small companies vs large companies, rather than US vs Chinese.
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoCue the uncountable number of Chinese jobs generated by overseas companies / the US monopolies, indirectly or directly....
- ImJamal 2y agoDo you think a Chinese company results in more US jobs than a US company?
- thrance 2y agoOk, well in that case, sure. But the alternative to US monopoly is not automatically Chinese monopoly. No one was advocating for the destruction of Google in favor of Baidu or whatever.
- ImJamal 2y agoThe person you were responding to was explicitly comparing US vs Chinese monopolies. Maybe it is a false dichotomy, but that was the situation that the post was brining up.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bobthepanda 2y agoIt’s not clear that Chinese owned monopolies are any good at breaking out. They seem to suffer from the same problem as Japan where their market is so unique and insular that a lot of products do not carry over all that well. WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
- loeg 2y agoAlibaba and ByteDance have both successfully broken out.
- bobthepanda 2y agoTwo that prove the exception, not the rule. And ByteDance isn’t meaningfully a monopoly in any sense of that word. What are they monopolizing?
- rootsudo 2y agoIt also goes bothends, there were numerous western messaging apps that come and go, wechat has been around since the AIM and blackberry messenger PIN days. Where are those two protocols/messsaging apps now? It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
- dmoy 2y agoWechat hasn't really been super popular since AIM days. ~15 years ago when I was in China I don't think it even existed, and 10 years ago there was significant numbers of people using qq still instead of WeChat (or rather not in addition to? Lot of people still use both). I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
- jjmarr 2y agoHave you tried signing up for WeChat? It's nearly impossible to get an account.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago[flagged]
- rad_gruchalski 2y agoIn what way, please explain. Both are monopolies.
- Sloowms 2y agoIt's weird to suggest another monopoly will be allowed to exist in a thread about breaking up an illegal monopoly.