9 ms·

This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. This is one reason that I see most tech companie

This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale. I think that many of the growing problems in society today are fundamentally attributable to the extreme concentration of wealth and power that modern tech enables.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
It’s the story of most mature industries. Food delivery also remains cutthroat enough that this is a strange place to launch this complaint from.
- sroussey 1y ago
  It is also weird that there isn't a company with 2/3 of the market. Eventually it will happen i guess.
  - TylerE 1y ago
    Sysco is probably pretty close if you ignore the extremes of the market.
    - drivingmenuts 1y ago
      While Sysco is a monopoly, they apparently don't make anyone angry enough to get rid of them. My guess is that they are pretty even-handed across an entire industry and their customers are knowledgeable enough to not screw up a good thing when they see it.
      - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        No I think tech just gets obsessive media coverage these days (both from MSM and from influencers.) I know lots of event companies that hate Sysco, it just doesn't get as many clicks as a tech company does.
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
>This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. It is the only possible result of consumptive transactional organizations. Conquest in all forms is accretion and consumption based, until the organization gets to large to sustain a consistent direction, then it collapses and the people get pulled into many smaller companies. Those companies get accreted into a new superset monopolist/duoploist etc... and the bubble grows again and then explodes. Wash rinse repeat forever at different abstraction levels.
koakuma-chan 1y ago
And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?
- fabian2k 1y ago
  How can a company make delivery 10x better? The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at best indifferent service and quality.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    > How can a company make delivery 10x better? By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and restaurant directories optimized to show you what you actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new restaurant, that sort of thing. At Uber scale, you have people working on improving metrics, and those improvements translate across all the restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken" won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which pictures of their food generate more sales.
- teddyh 1y ago
  A monopoly could be 10 times as good, but what is their incentive to be 10 times as good?
  - miki123211 1y ago
    We have to distinguish between monopolies that keep their status by being great versus monopolies that have something else going on. Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users. This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching. 20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway. [1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
tiahura 1y ago
What tech companies? These are food delivery brokers that have an app.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Have an app is doing a lot of work there. Uber eats at least is fairly sophisticated back and front end and certainly not a weekend project or something say Domino's Pizza can outsource to a team to get it to that quality.
gandalfian 1y ago
And long before that Warren Buffet talking about only backing companies who have built a competitive moat.
fasterik 1y ago
There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were alive, he'd say that the problem isn't the tech companies, it's their customers. I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information. My theory is that if you're extremely pessimistic about technology or politics, you probably won't like anything that happens when large groups of humans make collective decisions. There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. Personally, I've accepted that it's always going to be messy and chaotic, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it as well.
- budududuroiu 1y ago
  We don’t have to go back to hunter gatherer societies, just do some antitrust. I dislike the commentary that any pushback against tech companies means you’re a Luddite
  - fasterik 1y ago
    Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition. Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
    - budududuroiu 1y ago
      You read an article that talks about consolidation of food delivery and increasingly high barriers to new entrants and think that’s competition?
wyldfire 1y ago
> Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale. At least in the US we had national monopolies that took serious regulation to solve. That regulation, strangely enough, is still in place. Perhaps early on there's fear to regulate a nascent industry and by the time regulators realize the problem they're too afraid of the power wielded by the monopolists. In any case, it's never too late to break up these monopolies. The problem is that the Robber Barons are too far in the past to serve as a lesson for current generations. And some folks might remember AT&T but not understand why it was such a big deal.
nimbius 1y ago
this is essentially the story of capitalism as it always results in monopoly concentration and the development of industry cartels. before tech it was oil, before oil it was rubber and tobbaco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly_capitalism
- stinkbeetle 1y ago
  Modern capitalist liberal democracies have theoretically strong frameworks and powers for regulating and dismantling cartels though. The real story is that politicians and bureaucrats in government become corrupted by them and fail to act for the good of the people. And that is the story of humanity, not any particular classification of society and governance.
jonator 1y ago
Capitalism does facilitate monopolies or industries with razor thin margins like airlines. However, the space of competition is a revolving door with constant opportunity to create something better (that people want) than the established players or to enter a new arena entirely. Ultimately, since consumers are the choosers, it works in their favor. It was the consumers that wanted these companies to exist, and the profits are a proof of that. However, sometimes there are unpriced externalities like the competitive advantage of removing your own manufacturing waste by dumping it into a stream. That is where governance (whether self or the state) comes in.
WalterBright 1y ago
Big business is the engine that drives the economy. Small businesses are the future big businesses. Economies where big business is discouraged don't do very well. Small business doesn't have economy of scale, nor can it raise the capital to do big projects. > extreme concentration of wealth Big business does not concentrate wealth. What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  How big is big? There are big businesses such as Ford and then there are big businesses like Nvidia or Amazon. We should encourage more Fords and fewer Amazons.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  > Big business does not concentrate wealth. They absolutely do. If for no other reason than each of their revenue goes to fewer entities. > What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc. This is the flawed reasoning behind "trickle-down economics"[0], which was called "horse and sparrow" in the 19th century. It didn't work in the 19th century when labelled as the latter nor in the 20th when reframed as the former. Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition. Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific entities is irrelevant. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    > Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy. Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before. Now, if you decide to use my painting as compost (sob!), you are dissipating the million dollar value. That's not me concentrating wealth, it's you destroying your wealth. If you stole the painting from me, then you concentrated wealth. But we're not talking about theft here.
alberth 1y ago
> the story of tech companies across nearly every industry I don’t think this is limited to tech companies. Most industries are controlled by a few companies in those sectors. Such as Steel, railwood, pharma, grocery, etc.
- pempem 1y ago
  Surely we're understanding that VCs are playing a stronger game in the software industry. Cost of goods is lower, overhead is lower in software than in all the items you mentioned and VCs starve out other players by reducing their costs, capturing the market and increasing cost once captured.
billy99k 1y ago
All mature markets eventually end up with 3-5 competitors dominating the market. I don't really see this as an issue. I also disagree that it's a net negative. Technology adds convenience to these markets and as long as the government isn't price-fixing through strict regulations, we also end up with better prices. We've seen some of the prices increase after the government decided to regulate the hotel markets. They forced many people to stop renting out their places through sites like Airbnb and now the hotels are free to increase prices accordingly. If it weren't for Uber and Lyft, the Taxi cab unions would have gladly monopolized the industry charging workers $1,000,000+ for a medallion and not keeping up with technology (Taxis were still hailed in person or ordered on the phone before the tech companies decided to compete).
- jpalawaga 1y ago
  mature markets end up 3-5 competitors because further mergers end up blocked. capitalism would otherwise allow them to contract to a single player. So I'm sure that's one government control that you'd agree is worthwhile.
  - TFYS 1y ago
    And even that blocking doesn't matter much anymore, because the owners of all those 3-5 companies are starting to be the same entities. Because the same people/organizations own all of the companies, they no longer care which one is currently winning and so won't push them to compete against each other as much as they would if the ownership didn't have any overlap. They'll push for policies that allow those players to exist together without stepping on each others toes.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Not at all, you see this pattern in markets that regulators ignore too. It's a human limit. You end up with 3-5 competitors because the incremental value of yet another competitor becomes nearly zero very fast. People have very strict limits on how much information about a specific market they care to remember. To even have 2-3 competitors they have to put a ton of work into differentiation and marketing, otherwise people forget they exist. Sometimes you do see more, and it's indeed because regulators are stopping mergers. The airline market is like that. But it's a mistake and the regulators should back off. It's not helping people to have a gazillion undifferentiated brands, at some point it's just wasteful duplication. The idea that every market would contract to a single player if not for the benign wisdom of the regulators is a trope. Regulators are tiny compared to the number of markets that exist, but competitive markets aren't the exception, they're the norm. You see it even in very sticky locked-in markets where regulators deliberately decided not to intervene, like operating systems and browsers (Justice Dept effort to break up MS was cancelled).
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
> This is essentially the story of capitalism FTFY > Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale There's been plenty of national and global monopolies (I mean, that's literally why we had Antitrust laws made in the 1890's) as well as industries with only a couple players in a market. In fact, if you name any industry, it's probably led by just 3-5 corporations. Mobile service? Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. Television news? Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Fox, Warner Bros. Liquor? AB InBev, Diageo, Pernod, Suntory, Bacardi. Wine? E&J Gallo, The Wine Group, Constellation. Beer? Ab InBev, Heineken, Snow Breweries. Cars? Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Stellantis. Airlines? Delta, American, United, Southwest, Lufthansa. Oil and gas? Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, PetroChina, Shell. Music? Universal, Sony, Warner. Coke, Pepsi, Keurig. This is what capitalism does. By definition it grows as large as it possibly can, shutting out competitors.
keysdev 1y ago
This is just mega corporatism in general, which was first pioneered by the Nazi Germany. Now it is just exported to US disguising as capitalism. US is just following the playbook of IG Farben back in Nazi Time.
AbstractH24 1y ago
I’m realizing more and more that it’s rarely technological advances that make any particular company successful and impactful. It’s more often the business acumen. Were “nerds” with coding skills really ever the best ones to be starting companies? How many successful ones were founded without leadership being handed over to “suits” pretty early on?
- yifanl 1y ago
  You need nerds to build something at a baseline competency that you can sell it, then you need to be the greasiest salesman ever to sell it harder once you've gotten a foothold. People genuinely do not care about product quality, doubly so in the world of software (see: Crowdstrike is still in business).
  - AbstractH24 1y ago
    It would be interesting to see the success rates of startups based on how early on leadership includes MBAs. Or based on how early on they have people with corporate experience at the top. Does baseline competency stop being the differentiator after seed? Series A? B?
mindwok 1y ago
Weird timing to see this, as I have come to the same conclusion and was writing a blog post on it. I think we need to start figuring out how to modify our economic system to prevent this, because as you pointed out the tech world is much more “winner takes all” than the physical world, and watching industries consolidate globally under a handful of players is extremely concerning.
autobodie 1y ago
it's just the story of companies across industries.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Tech has also reached into EVERY aspect/detail of our lives 24/7 to try and extract value from it. Tech originally preached that it's going to improve/simplify/enrich our lives. Instead tech is farming us like we have never been farmed before while giving us none of the original promise/deal. There is no peace. There is no escape. The improvements in our life are normally marginal and short term. There is no just existing, just constant, continuous farming of you for whatever value can be extracted. And because of how tech scales any extraction is never too small to not be worth going after. At least in the Matrix you weren’t expected to curate your own enslavement and smile and post about it daily.
jrm4 1y ago
Yup. I would 100% support aggressive localism here, given that the actual service is very easy to replicate. I'd absolutely support an absurdly high tax on any "out-of-town" food delivery service in order to -- maybe "artificially" -- prop up a local one. There is now NO good reason anyone in California deserves a cent for e.g. a local Florida driver delivering local Florida food to a local Florida customer.
sporkland 1y ago
The problem with this line of thought is that everyone just uses it to hate on people they already hated on. You go after rich tech monopolies, progressives generally go after big business, conservatives use it to go after the biggest business of all, the government. We all just need to focus on monopoly in all its forms, instead of letting the politicians continue to separate us using division without difference.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

It’s the story of most mature industries. Food delivery also remains cutthroat enough that this is a strange place to launch this complaint from.

sroussey 1y ago
It is also weird that there isn't a company with 2/3 of the market. Eventually it will happen i guess.
- TylerE 1y ago
  Sysco is probably pretty close if you ignore the extremes of the market.
  - drivingmenuts 1y ago
    While Sysco is a monopoly, they apparently don't make anyone angry enough to get rid of them. My guess is that they are pretty even-handed across an entire industry and their customers are knowledgeable enough to not screw up a good thing when they see it.
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      No I think tech just gets obsessive media coverage these days (both from MSM and from influencers.) I know lots of event companies that hate Sysco, it just doesn't get as many clicks as a tech company does.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

>This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. It is the only possible result of consumptive transactional organizations. Conquest in all forms is accretion and consumption based, until the organization gets to large to sustain a consistent direction, then it collapses and the people get pulled into many smaller companies. Those companies get accreted into a new superset monopolist/duoploist etc... and the bubble grows again and then explodes. Wash rinse repeat forever at different abstraction levels.

koakuma-chan 1y ago

And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?

fabian2k 1y ago
How can a company make delivery 10x better? The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at best indifferent service and quality.
- miki123211 1y ago
  > How can a company make delivery 10x better? By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and restaurant directories optimized to show you what you actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new restaurant, that sort of thing. At Uber scale, you have people working on improving metrics, and those improvements translate across all the restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken" won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which pictures of their food generate more sales.
teddyh 1y ago
A monopoly could be 10 times as good, but what is their incentive to be 10 times as good?
- miki123211 1y ago
  We have to distinguish between monopolies that keep their status by being great versus monopolies that have something else going on. Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users. This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching. 20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway. [1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.

tiahura 1y ago

What tech companies? These are food delivery brokers that have an app.

bravesoul2 1y ago
Have an app is doing a lot of work there. Uber eats at least is fairly sophisticated back and front end and certainly not a weekend project or something say Domino's Pizza can outsource to a team to get it to that quality.

gandalfian 1y ago

And long before that Warren Buffet talking about only backing companies who have built a competitive moat.

fasterik 1y ago

There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were alive, he'd say that the problem isn't the tech companies, it's their customers. I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information. My theory is that if you're extremely pessimistic about technology or politics, you probably won't like anything that happens when large groups of humans make collective decisions. There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. Personally, I've accepted that it's always going to be messy and chaotic, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it as well.

budududuroiu 1y ago
We don’t have to go back to hunter gatherer societies, just do some antitrust. I dislike the commentary that any pushback against tech companies means you’re a Luddite
- fasterik 1y ago
  Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition. Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
  - budududuroiu 1y ago
    You read an article that talks about consolidation of food delivery and increasingly high barriers to new entrants and think that’s competition?

wyldfire 1y ago

> Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale. At least in the US we had national monopolies that took serious regulation to solve. That regulation, strangely enough, is still in place. Perhaps early on there's fear to regulate a nascent industry and by the time regulators realize the problem they're too afraid of the power wielded by the monopolists. In any case, it's never too late to break up these monopolies. The problem is that the Robber Barons are too far in the past to serve as a lesson for current generations. And some folks might remember AT&T but not understand why it was such a big deal.

nimbius 1y ago

this is essentially the story of capitalism as it always results in monopoly concentration and the development of industry cartels. before tech it was oil, before oil it was rubber and tobbaco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly_capitalism

stinkbeetle 1y ago
Modern capitalist liberal democracies have theoretically strong frameworks and powers for regulating and dismantling cartels though. The real story is that politicians and bureaucrats in government become corrupted by them and fail to act for the good of the people. And that is the story of humanity, not any particular classification of society and governance.

jonator 1y ago

Capitalism does facilitate monopolies or industries with razor thin margins like airlines. However, the space of competition is a revolving door with constant opportunity to create something better (that people want) than the established players or to enter a new arena entirely. Ultimately, since consumers are the choosers, it works in their favor. It was the consumers that wanted these companies to exist, and the profits are a proof of that. However, sometimes there are unpriced externalities like the competitive advantage of removing your own manufacturing waste by dumping it into a stream. That is where governance (whether self or the state) comes in.

WalterBright 1y ago

Big business is the engine that drives the economy. Small businesses are the future big businesses. Economies where big business is discouraged don't do very well. Small business doesn't have economy of scale, nor can it raise the capital to do big projects. > extreme concentration of wealth Big business does not concentrate wealth. What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
How big is big? There are big businesses such as Ford and then there are big businesses like Nvidia or Amazon. We should encourage more Fords and fewer Amazons.
AdieuToLogic 1y ago
> Big business does not concentrate wealth. They absolutely do. If for no other reason than each of their revenue goes to fewer entities. > What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc. This is the flawed reasoning behind "trickle-down economics"[0], which was called "horse and sparrow" in the 19th century. It didn't work in the 19th century when labelled as the latter nor in the 20th when reframed as the former. Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition. Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific entities is irrelevant. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy. Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before. Now, if you decide to use my painting as compost (sob!), you are dissipating the million dollar value. That's not me concentrating wealth, it's you destroying your wealth. If you stole the painting from me, then you concentrated wealth. But we're not talking about theft here.

alberth 1y ago

> the story of tech companies across nearly every industry I don’t think this is limited to tech companies. Most industries are controlled by a few companies in those sectors. Such as Steel, railwood, pharma, grocery, etc.

pempem 1y ago
Surely we're understanding that VCs are playing a stronger game in the software industry. Cost of goods is lower, overhead is lower in software than in all the items you mentioned and VCs starve out other players by reducing their costs, capturing the market and increasing cost once captured.

billy99k 1y ago

All mature markets eventually end up with 3-5 competitors dominating the market. I don't really see this as an issue. I also disagree that it's a net negative. Technology adds convenience to these markets and as long as the government isn't price-fixing through strict regulations, we also end up with better prices. We've seen some of the prices increase after the government decided to regulate the hotel markets. They forced many people to stop renting out their places through sites like Airbnb and now the hotels are free to increase prices accordingly. If it weren't for Uber and Lyft, the Taxi cab unions would have gladly monopolized the industry charging workers $1,000,000+ for a medallion and not keeping up with technology (Taxis were still hailed in person or ordered on the phone before the tech companies decided to compete).

jpalawaga 1y ago
mature markets end up 3-5 competitors because further mergers end up blocked. capitalism would otherwise allow them to contract to a single player. So I'm sure that's one government control that you'd agree is worthwhile.
- TFYS 1y ago
  And even that blocking doesn't matter much anymore, because the owners of all those 3-5 companies are starting to be the same entities. Because the same people/organizations own all of the companies, they no longer care which one is currently winning and so won't push them to compete against each other as much as they would if the ownership didn't have any overlap. They'll push for policies that allow those players to exist together without stepping on each others toes.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Not at all, you see this pattern in markets that regulators ignore too. It's a human limit. You end up with 3-5 competitors because the incremental value of yet another competitor becomes nearly zero very fast. People have very strict limits on how much information about a specific market they care to remember. To even have 2-3 competitors they have to put a ton of work into differentiation and marketing, otherwise people forget they exist. Sometimes you do see more, and it's indeed because regulators are stopping mergers. The airline market is like that. But it's a mistake and the regulators should back off. It's not helping people to have a gazillion undifferentiated brands, at some point it's just wasteful duplication. The idea that every market would contract to a single player if not for the benign wisdom of the regulators is a trope. Regulators are tiny compared to the number of markets that exist, but competitive markets aren't the exception, they're the norm. You see it even in very sticky locked-in markets where regulators deliberately decided not to intervene, like operating systems and browsers (Justice Dept effort to break up MS was cancelled).

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

> This is essentially the story of capitalism FTFY > Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale There's been plenty of national and global monopolies (I mean, that's literally why we had Antitrust laws made in the 1890's) as well as industries with only a couple players in a market. In fact, if you name any industry, it's probably led by just 3-5 corporations. Mobile service? Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. Television news? Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Fox, Warner Bros. Liquor? AB InBev, Diageo, Pernod, Suntory, Bacardi. Wine? E&J Gallo, The Wine Group, Constellation. Beer? Ab InBev, Heineken, Snow Breweries. Cars? Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Stellantis. Airlines? Delta, American, United, Southwest, Lufthansa. Oil and gas? Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, PetroChina, Shell. Music? Universal, Sony, Warner. Coke, Pepsi, Keurig. This is what capitalism does. By definition it grows as large as it possibly can, shutting out competitors.

keysdev 1y ago

This is just mega corporatism in general, which was first pioneered by the Nazi Germany. Now it is just exported to US disguising as capitalism. US is just following the playbook of IG Farben back in Nazi Time.

AbstractH24 1y ago

I’m realizing more and more that it’s rarely technological advances that make any particular company successful and impactful. It’s more often the business acumen. Were “nerds” with coding skills really ever the best ones to be starting companies? How many successful ones were founded without leadership being handed over to “suits” pretty early on?

yifanl 1y ago
You need nerds to build something at a baseline competency that you can sell it, then you need to be the greasiest salesman ever to sell it harder once you've gotten a foothold. People genuinely do not care about product quality, doubly so in the world of software (see: Crowdstrike is still in business).
- AbstractH24 1y ago
  It would be interesting to see the success rates of startups based on how early on leadership includes MBAs. Or based on how early on they have people with corporate experience at the top. Does baseline competency stop being the differentiator after seed? Series A? B?

mindwok 1y ago

Weird timing to see this, as I have come to the same conclusion and was writing a blog post on it. I think we need to start figuring out how to modify our economic system to prevent this, because as you pointed out the tech world is much more “winner takes all” than the physical world, and watching industries consolidate globally under a handful of players is extremely concerning.

autobodie 1y ago

it's just the story of companies across industries.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

Tech has also reached into EVERY aspect/detail of our lives 24/7 to try and extract value from it. Tech originally preached that it's going to improve/simplify/enrich our lives. Instead tech is farming us like we have never been farmed before while giving us none of the original promise/deal. There is no peace. There is no escape. The improvements in our life are normally marginal and short term. There is no just existing, just constant, continuous farming of you for whatever value can be extracted. And because of how tech scales any extraction is never too small to not be worth going after. At least in the Matrix you weren’t expected to curate your own enslavement and smile and post about it daily.

jrm4 1y ago

Yup. I would 100% support aggressive localism here, given that the actual service is very easy to replicate. I'd absolutely support an absurdly high tax on any "out-of-town" food delivery service in order to -- maybe "artificially" -- prop up a local one. There is now NO good reason anyone in California deserves a cent for e.g. a local Florida driver delivering local Florida food to a local Florida customer.

sporkland 1y ago

The problem with this line of thought is that everyone just uses it to hate on people they already hated on. You go after rich tech monopolies, progressives generally go after big business, conservatives use it to go after the biggest business of all, the government. We all just need to focus on monopoly in all its forms, instead of letting the politicians continue to separate us using division without difference.