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I don't understand how this worldview coexists with countries like Russia and China. If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generati

I don't understand how this worldview coexists with countries like Russia and China. If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.

Ar-Curunir 2y ago
So competition isn’t actually good for free market economics?
- creato 2y ago
  A level playing field is good. The playing field includes other countries.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Why wouldn't antitrust laws apply to companies from other countries? If you ban tying app stores to phone platforms and then China creates a phone platform and wants to tie an app store to it, they're not any less banned from selling that into your market than a domestic company.
    - creato 2y ago
      There's a whole world outside the US and China that companies are competing in.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        A market the size of the US or the EU is large enough to sustain a domestic industry. Competing suppliers can then recover their fixed costs from the markets where they're protected against monopolistic practices, which sustains their existence, and then sell into the other markets with the backing of a stable competitive domestic supply chain that can't be degraded by anti-competitive practices. Example: Right now if you want to create a competing phone without Google, you lose most of the apps in the Play Store because they're encouraged to have dependencies on Google services. If that was prohibited in a large market then app developers couldn't assume those dependencies are available and the APIs would either have to become an open source part of stock Android or developers would use platform-independent third party libraries. Then the apps made for that market could run on a third party device -- but developers aren't going to make separate apps for different markets, they're just going to avoid the proprietary APIs that aren't available in a major market, and then those apps don't have those proprietary dependencies in the other markets either and your domestic competitor can compete there too. Also, the whole world outside the US and China wouldn't even have the excuse of protecting domestic megacorps as a reason not to have strong antitrust laws themselves.
nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek
vlovich123 2y ago
Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.
- Tanath 2y ago
  Smaller is less efficient. They don't get to benefit from economy of scale as much as larger.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    They also don’t have the communication and process overheads and don’t have existing contracts that constrain how fast and where they can go. If smaller companies weren’t possibly to run more efficiently, you’d never see startups leapfrogging established players. Economies of scale are a strength and can also be a weakness (e.g. your economy of scale to do X means you can’t do Y which is more profitable / cheaper)
lillecarl 2y ago
Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think. It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced. Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g? We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers. What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable. Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit. People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access. In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.
  - alt227 2y ago
    > Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit. Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up. It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose. I'd like to see this outcome.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    Why would browsers turn to "shit"? The web platform is quite capable these days. I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.
babypuncher 2y ago
I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps. Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
regularjack 2y ago
You think monopolies should exist?
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market. If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives. You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
  - transcriptase 2y ago
    Canada tries this. The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market. The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform? > If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives. Let's review the problem with Chrome. Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken. If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them. Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share. > You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.
jjmarr 2y ago
Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent. There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
- coliveira 2y ago
  > Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.
  - cobbzilla 2y ago
    What does compete with the government mean? Should FedEx not compete with USPS on parcel delivery?
fishcrackers 2y ago
[dead]
benrutter 2y ago
Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before. The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing). From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground. I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
ndriscoll 2y ago
I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.
epicureanideal 2y ago
We should run our economy in the way that has the best long term outcome, which is likely with plenty of competition rather than monopolies. If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
627467 2y ago
and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?
marcosdumay 2y ago
> If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
- xvector 2y ago
  AT&T did not have international competitors.
ljsprague 2y ago
Just ban the ones from worse jurisdictions then.
pllbnk 2y ago
I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.

Ar-Curunir 2y ago

So competition isn’t actually good for free market economics?

creato 2y ago
A level playing field is good. The playing field includes other countries.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Why wouldn't antitrust laws apply to companies from other countries? If you ban tying app stores to phone platforms and then China creates a phone platform and wants to tie an app store to it, they're not any less banned from selling that into your market than a domestic company.
  - creato 2y ago
    There's a whole world outside the US and China that companies are competing in.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      A market the size of the US or the EU is large enough to sustain a domestic industry. Competing suppliers can then recover their fixed costs from the markets where they're protected against monopolistic practices, which sustains their existence, and then sell into the other markets with the backing of a stable competitive domestic supply chain that can't be degraded by anti-competitive practices. Example: Right now if you want to create a competing phone without Google, you lose most of the apps in the Play Store because they're encouraged to have dependencies on Google services. If that was prohibited in a large market then app developers couldn't assume those dependencies are available and the APIs would either have to become an open source part of stock Android or developers would use platform-independent third party libraries. Then the apps made for that market could run on a third party device -- but developers aren't going to make separate apps for different markets, they're just going to avoid the proprietary APIs that aren't available in a major market, and then those apps don't have those proprietary dependencies in the other markets either and your domestic competitor can compete there too. Also, the whole world outside the US and China wouldn't even have the excuse of protecting domestic megacorps as a reason not to have strong antitrust laws themselves.

nyc_data_geek1 2y ago

Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek

vlovich123 2y ago

Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.

Tanath 2y ago
Smaller is less efficient. They don't get to benefit from economy of scale as much as larger.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  They also don’t have the communication and process overheads and don’t have existing contracts that constrain how fast and where they can go. If smaller companies weren’t possibly to run more efficiently, you’d never see startups leapfrogging established players. Economies of scale are a strength and can also be a weakness (e.g. your economy of scale to do X means you can’t do Y which is more profitable / cheaper)

lillecarl 2y ago

Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think. It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced. Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g? We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.

iLoveOncall 2y ago
Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers. What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable. Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit. People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access. In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.
- alt227 2y ago
  > Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit. Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up. It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose. I'd like to see this outcome.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  Why would browsers turn to "shit"? The web platform is quite capable these days. I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.

babypuncher 2y ago

I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps. Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.

regularjack 2y ago

You think monopolies should exist?

jay_kyburz 2y ago
Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market. If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives. You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
- transcriptase 2y ago
  Canada tries this. The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market. The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform? > If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives. Let's review the problem with Chrome. Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken. If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them. Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share. > You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.

jjmarr 2y ago

Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent. There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.

coliveira 2y ago
> Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.
- cobbzilla 2y ago
  What does compete with the government mean? Should FedEx not compete with USPS on parcel delivery?

fishcrackers 2y ago

[dead]

benrutter 2y ago

Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before. The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing). From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground. I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.

ndriscoll 2y ago

I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.

epicureanideal 2y ago

We should run our economy in the way that has the best long term outcome, which is likely with plenty of competition rather than monopolies. If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.

627467 2y ago

and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?

marcosdumay 2y ago

> If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.

xvector 2y ago
AT&T did not have international competitors.

ljsprague 2y ago

Just ban the ones from worse jurisdictions then.

pllbnk 2y ago

I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.