4 ms·

No one is forcing you to use Google, Facebook, Amazon or any other Internet website. End of story for me.

corin_ 12y ago
I'm fully on Google's side in this news story, but the fact that no-one forces you to use them... that's irrelevant to monopoly or anti-competitive laws (both of which are good things to exist, even if they can lead to shitty attempts at execution).
- nickik 12y ago
  What are the brilliant sucess storys of antitrust laws? I have spend a fair bit of time reasearching them and far more then 50% of the cases it was just losing competition looking for governemnt hand outs. So if that is true, on what bases do you defend them? Let me give you a example for another imaganry law. Assume cops are allowed to walk around with full automatic weapons. Now in the majority of cases this causes suffering for people who are not at fault. In a few cases it helped. Now, your argument applies, sometimes you need automatic weapons. My question is does that make it good these laws exist? (Note I know nothing about the this example or what the data is there, its a example). Also in the antitrust cases there are tons of external cost. Companys spend there money on lobbying and laywers because they think its more effective then improving there product. Good companys getting hurt and also having to spend money on defence. There is also massiv amount of tax dollers spend on these things.
  - corin_ 12y ago
    This isn't an area I've ever looked into, so you could well be right that the negatives outweigh the benefits. My gut instinct is to disagree with you, i.e. you'd have to show me the evidence to change my mind (don't get me wrong - I could equally gather it myself if I cared enough, and I'm not actually asking you to try to change my mind). I'm defending them on the basis that the theory is good. For example the theory of cops having fully automatic weapons is good (they stop criminals, the more armed they are the more they can do that), but you're absolutely right about cost/benefits, and I'd always support less-armed police over more-armed police. My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant.
    - nickik 12y ago
      Well, Hacker News comments are not a format for this. I cant get all the sources in a short amount of time and doing this for one person in a tech forum is not really worth my time. Also if I just gave you things to read, you will have a bias starting point, I would only provide things that I think are good. So I can only advice that you start from blank and dive into it, see were your research leads you. I can only tell you my story. I had the same opinion as you do now, and because I became intrested in economics I started reading a lot about it and these tech monopoly cases pushed my attention towards these antitrust laws and my research change my mind. And its not even the case that these laws were put in place with good intention and then they were abused, but the other way around they were put in place to be abused. > My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant. The question really is, what is a monopoly. Its suprisingly hard to answer. Is the defintion that there are no real alternatives? Or that they have a market share of X%. Is a company that has a techniclly unique product a monoply because nobody else can produce it. If you think about it, everything is a monoply, nobody else can produce the exact thing you do. So there is a question about granularity of monopoly definition. Some might say 'over one market' but that is very vage as well. Take the car as a example, does it only compete with other cars of simular size or does it also compet with airplanes and trains? Does a car sometimes play in the same market as skype, because if I can work remotely I dont need a car. In economics, price theory is used, when a company can push the price over some equillibrum price its a monopoly but that of course cant really be used in the case of google or the internet explorer case. Also "you can choose not to use them" is relevant, because thats the last competition even the biggest monoply provider faces. For everything that is not a live or death question you have the option to not use it. Befor some pruduct/service X was invented you could live without X and now a monopoly provides X, you are not forced to buy X now, you can just go on with your live unchanged. This is very relevant in the economic analysis of markets and monopolys. Im not saying monopolys are not sometimes a problem, im just saying that the issue is far more complicated then it seams.
  - brc 12y ago
    Exactly. Microsoft was a monopoly, was it? Lamest monopoly ever seeing as they lost it in about ten years flat. Real monopolies are from government protected industries like taxicabs, which have been making monopoly profits for 50, 60, 70 years. Anti-trust laws - and he seeming unpredictability of when they might be applied, have a very real effect on business activities. And there is very little evidence they have ever done any good - while real, government created monopolies on many markets continue to injure consumers blatantly, all with the blessing of legislators. In my country, firms were fined for bundling fuel discounts - so we had the absurd case of a government department fining a company for selling goods cheaply to consumers. To me, antitrust laws are just a weapon the legislators use when they come across a company they don't like. They add no protection for consumers because there isn't a way to use them against government created or controlled monopolies.
- cabinpark 12y ago
  Why is it the government's job to tell companies they cannot be monopolies, especially in non-essential services?
  - corin_ 12y ago
    Why is it the government's job to tell companies what minimum wage they must pay, or what advertising is too misleading to be allowed? Because the goal of the government is to improve things for people. Feel free to argue that governments getting involved in this doesn't improve things (and you might be right, I don't know), but the logic of why would they get involved is simple.

I'm fully on Google's side in this news story, but the fact that no-one forces you to use them... that's irrelevant to monopoly or anti-competitive laws (both of which are good things to exist, even if they can lead to shitty attempts at execution).

nickik 12y ago
What are the brilliant sucess storys of antitrust laws? I have spend a fair bit of time reasearching them and far more then 50% of the cases it was just losing competition looking for governemnt hand outs. So if that is true, on what bases do you defend them? Let me give you a example for another imaganry law. Assume cops are allowed to walk around with full automatic weapons. Now in the majority of cases this causes suffering for people who are not at fault. In a few cases it helped. Now, your argument applies, sometimes you need automatic weapons. My question is does that make it good these laws exist? (Note I know nothing about the this example or what the data is there, its a example). Also in the antitrust cases there are tons of external cost. Companys spend there money on lobbying and laywers because they think its more effective then improving there product. Good companys getting hurt and also having to spend money on defence. There is also massiv amount of tax dollers spend on these things.
- corin_ 12y ago
  This isn't an area I've ever looked into, so you could well be right that the negatives outweigh the benefits. My gut instinct is to disagree with you, i.e. you'd have to show me the evidence to change my mind (don't get me wrong - I could equally gather it myself if I cared enough, and I'm not actually asking you to try to change my mind). I'm defending them on the basis that the theory is good. For example the theory of cops having fully automatic weapons is good (they stop criminals, the more armed they are the more they can do that), but you're absolutely right about cost/benefits, and I'd always support less-armed police over more-armed police. My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant.
  - nickik 12y ago
    Well, Hacker News comments are not a format for this. I cant get all the sources in a short amount of time and doing this for one person in a tech forum is not really worth my time. Also if I just gave you things to read, you will have a bias starting point, I would only provide things that I think are good. So I can only advice that you start from blank and dive into it, see were your research leads you. I can only tell you my story. I had the same opinion as you do now, and because I became intrested in economics I started reading a lot about it and these tech monopoly cases pushed my attention towards these antitrust laws and my research change my mind. And its not even the case that these laws were put in place with good intention and then they were abused, but the other way around they were put in place to be abused. > My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant. The question really is, what is a monopoly. Its suprisingly hard to answer. Is the defintion that there are no real alternatives? Or that they have a market share of X%. Is a company that has a techniclly unique product a monoply because nobody else can produce it. If you think about it, everything is a monoply, nobody else can produce the exact thing you do. So there is a question about granularity of monopoly definition. Some might say 'over one market' but that is very vage as well. Take the car as a example, does it only compete with other cars of simular size or does it also compet with airplanes and trains? Does a car sometimes play in the same market as skype, because if I can work remotely I dont need a car. In economics, price theory is used, when a company can push the price over some equillibrum price its a monopoly but that of course cant really be used in the case of google or the internet explorer case. Also "you can choose not to use them" is relevant, because thats the last competition even the biggest monoply provider faces. For everything that is not a live or death question you have the option to not use it. Befor some pruduct/service X was invented you could live without X and now a monopoly provides X, you are not forced to buy X now, you can just go on with your live unchanged. This is very relevant in the economic analysis of markets and monopolys. Im not saying monopolys are not sometimes a problem, im just saying that the issue is far more complicated then it seams.
- brc 12y ago
  Exactly. Microsoft was a monopoly, was it? Lamest monopoly ever seeing as they lost it in about ten years flat. Real monopolies are from government protected industries like taxicabs, which have been making monopoly profits for 50, 60, 70 years. Anti-trust laws - and he seeming unpredictability of when they might be applied, have a very real effect on business activities. And there is very little evidence they have ever done any good - while real, government created monopolies on many markets continue to injure consumers blatantly, all with the blessing of legislators. In my country, firms were fined for bundling fuel discounts - so we had the absurd case of a government department fining a company for selling goods cheaply to consumers. To me, antitrust laws are just a weapon the legislators use when they come across a company they don't like. They add no protection for consumers because there isn't a way to use them against government created or controlled monopolies.
cabinpark 12y ago
Why is it the government's job to tell companies they cannot be monopolies, especially in non-essential services?
- corin_ 12y ago
  Why is it the government's job to tell companies what minimum wage they must pay, or what advertising is too misleading to be allowed? Because the goal of the government is to improve things for people. Feel free to argue that governments getting involved in this doesn't improve things (and you might be right, I don't know), but the logic of why would they get involved is simple.