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When Google, Facebook, or Microsoft acquire a service I use and love is it still the internet I deserve? Not all centralisation is done through natural, market

by yardie 12y ago

When Google, Facebook, or Microsoft acquire a service I use and love is it still the internet I deserve? Not all centralisation is done through natural, market forces. Sometimes Big Internet uses its bottomless purse to keep itself out in front.

rayiner 12y ago
Giant companies using their cash is a market force. How did they get that money? In the market, through their massive user bases.
- yardie 12y ago
  ...and lawyers, and legislation, and patent portfolio, and many other events that doesn't even touch a "free market". You do know that at the moment the US gov't is deciding if 2 or 3 national ISPs is enough competition. Where are all the other upstarts? Effectively locked out. How? If you showed up early enough you were subsidised in deploying infrastructure. If you showed up a little late that is no longer an option to you. So yes, continue being naive about how those market forces rely exclusively on cash.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    We have one maybe two widely used search engines. One or two social networks dominate the landscape. The third mobile OS is a distant competitor to the main two. Two cell phone companies make almost all the profits in that industry. Until recently, one processor manufacturer dominated the consumer sector, with a competitor that it had to prop up for apperances' sake. Did Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, use lawyers and legislation to achieve victory? Proponents of startups who also believe in the market have to deal with a certain cognitive dissonance. They have to convince themselves that giant corporations can only win through non-market means. But the fact is that the market almost always favors scale. Apple and Samsung win not through suing "upstarts" for patent infringement, but through the kind of vertical integration only possible with scale. If you can spend $2 billion on a factory to make sapphire glass screens at a price point the "upstarts" can't match, then you win, through purely market means. If you're Verizon and can spend billions to have LTE coverage everywhere in the country, that's what leads you to dominance over the upstarts, not the regulatory regime. Go back to before the modern regulatory state. Did Standard Oil and U.S. Steel lawyer themselves to victory? No, they did the same thing Apple and Samsung are doing: dominate the competition by leveraging scale.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Did Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, use lawyers and legislation to achieve victory? Sort of, don't know, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Page rank patent, ???, lawsuits on patent/copyright/look-and-feel against clones and competitors, instruction set patents, one-click patent, anti-competitive OEM contracts and more.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Two or three choices would be more than I have now. I can choose Comcast or nothing.
tedunangst 12y ago
You make it sound like the acquired companies themselves have no choice in the matter.
- cabalamat 12y ago
  The companies have a choice; their users don't.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Obvious solution: only use services that have public statements promising not to be acquired. From the sound of HN comments, that would be quite the market differentiator. The dearth of such companies perhaps reveals something about what all the world changing services you like are really about.
    - wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
      the problem with that is then people would have to build actually businesses rather than loss leader "startups" that are only around to break even and pray for an acquisition
    - barrkel 12y ago
      Are you familiar with the collective action problem? The inconvenience of filtering the services you use by the public statements of their provider companies makes it almost wholly unreasonable to expect market forces to fix moral failings in companies, unless they're egregious enough to get play in the mass media - which has its own problems of mob activism. Users don't have an effective choice. This isn't something markets can easily fix.
Shorel 12y ago
Yes, because if the only way such service can get any profit is via mergers and acquisitions, then that's what's going to happen. And I'm not even talking about ad-block. Ads are one way to have some profit, but they are not optimal in any way. Microtransactions should be possible. May be Bitcoin will allow this in the future.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Google, Facebook, and Microsoft acquire services in ... a market! So, yes, that very much happens through "natural market forces", and you very much have a choice in whether you use services that can be acquired/make any sense to acquire/where it makes any difference whether they get acquired or not. Just to give some examples: I use multiple public, non-profit IRC networks. The chance of those being acquired? Pretty close to zero. And even if, dropping one of them wouldn't really hurt much, and if everything else fails, even setting up my own would not be out of reach, keeping all the same user experience. Then, I use a usenet news server. If that one got acquired? Well, as long as the service stayed the same, it wouldn't really matter much, and if they started doing funny things in order to increase profits, it would be trivial to switch to a different provider that doesn't (which really should discourage anyone from even trying). Or how about my own email server? That will be damn difficult to acquire, I'd think. At most someone could acquire my ISP ... which, again, is highly fungible, if they started doing anything funny, I'd just obtain connectivity elsewhere. Yes, it very much is a "natural market force" that monopolies will form where you don't make the concious choice to use technology that is inherently monopoly unfriendly, and as such one could say that you "deserve" the monopoly if you use a service that can be acquired and where that has any real consequences.

by yardie 12y ago

rayiner 12y ago

Giant companies using their cash is a market force. How did they get that money? In the market, through their massive user bases.

yardie 12y ago
...and lawyers, and legislation, and patent portfolio, and many other events that doesn't even touch a "free market". You do know that at the moment the US gov't is deciding if 2 or 3 national ISPs is enough competition. Where are all the other upstarts? Effectively locked out. How? If you showed up early enough you were subsidised in deploying infrastructure. If you showed up a little late that is no longer an option to you. So yes, continue being naive about how those market forces rely exclusively on cash.
- rayiner 12y ago
  We have one maybe two widely used search engines. One or two social networks dominate the landscape. The third mobile OS is a distant competitor to the main two. Two cell phone companies make almost all the profits in that industry. Until recently, one processor manufacturer dominated the consumer sector, with a competitor that it had to prop up for apperances' sake. Did Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, use lawyers and legislation to achieve victory? Proponents of startups who also believe in the market have to deal with a certain cognitive dissonance. They have to convince themselves that giant corporations can only win through non-market means. But the fact is that the market almost always favors scale. Apple and Samsung win not through suing "upstarts" for patent infringement, but through the kind of vertical integration only possible with scale. If you can spend $2 billion on a factory to make sapphire glass screens at a price point the "upstarts" can't match, then you win, through purely market means. If you're Verizon and can spend billions to have LTE coverage everywhere in the country, that's what leads you to dominance over the upstarts, not the regulatory regime. Go back to before the modern regulatory state. Did Standard Oil and U.S. Steel lawyer themselves to victory? No, they did the same thing Apple and Samsung are doing: dominate the competition by leveraging scale.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Did Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, use lawyers and legislation to achieve victory? Sort of, don't know, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Page rank patent, ???, lawsuits on patent/copyright/look-and-feel against clones and competitors, instruction set patents, one-click patent, anti-competitive OEM contracts and more.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Two or three choices would be more than I have now. I can choose Comcast or nothing.

tedunangst 12y ago

You make it sound like the acquired companies themselves have no choice in the matter.

cabalamat 12y ago
The companies have a choice; their users don't.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Obvious solution: only use services that have public statements promising not to be acquired. From the sound of HN comments, that would be quite the market differentiator. The dearth of such companies perhaps reveals something about what all the world changing services you like are really about.
  - wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
    the problem with that is then people would have to build actually businesses rather than loss leader "startups" that are only around to break even and pray for an acquisition
  - barrkel 12y ago
    Are you familiar with the collective action problem? The inconvenience of filtering the services you use by the public statements of their provider companies makes it almost wholly unreasonable to expect market forces to fix moral failings in companies, unless they're egregious enough to get play in the mass media - which has its own problems of mob activism. Users don't have an effective choice. This isn't something markets can easily fix.

Shorel 12y ago

Yes, because if the only way such service can get any profit is via mergers and acquisitions, then that's what's going to happen. And I'm not even talking about ad-block. Ads are one way to have some profit, but they are not optimal in any way. Microtransactions should be possible. May be Bitcoin will allow this in the future.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft acquire services in ... a market! So, yes, that very much happens through "natural market forces", and you very much have a choice in whether you use services that can be acquired/make any sense to acquire/where it makes any difference whether they get acquired or not. Just to give some examples: I use multiple public, non-profit IRC networks. The chance of those being acquired? Pretty close to zero. And even if, dropping one of them wouldn't really hurt much, and if everything else fails, even setting up my own would not be out of reach, keeping all the same user experience. Then, I use a usenet news server. If that one got acquired? Well, as long as the service stayed the same, it wouldn't really matter much, and if they started doing funny things in order to increase profits, it would be trivial to switch to a different provider that doesn't (which really should discourage anyone from even trying). Or how about my own email server? That will be damn difficult to acquire, I'd think. At most someone could acquire my ISP ... which, again, is highly fungible, if they started doing anything funny, I'd just obtain connectivity elsewhere. Yes, it very much is a "natural market force" that monopolies will form where you don't make the concious choice to use technology that is inherently monopoly unfriendly, and as such one could say that you "deserve" the monopoly if you use a service that can be acquired and where that has any real consequences.