In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramount.
To be honest, I'm not sold on the European-style philosophy. Guilds traditionally empowered tradespeople, but they also had a reputation for holding back innovation and punishing new ideas that didn't fit the existing paradigms. Amazon, for example, has made book-buying so cheap nationally that individual bookstores have trouble competing. Amazon's other failings aside (which should be addressed by sweeping employee / labor protections, not by breaking up Amazon): should Grandma's books be more expensive in general so the local bookstore owner gets to enjoy the lifestyle of self-business-ownership to which he is accustom? Why / why not?
Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obviated the need for a brick and mortars store, and it passes the benefit on to both consumer and author alike, in reduced prices and thus increased sales.
Since Amazon is not in the authorship business itself, since it gets an equal profit on all books, its book business is a lovely example of markets working to further society.
Amazon's problem is in the use of data metrics on its giant store to create products that compete with its partners. The Amazon Essentials line is anticompetitive IMO, because as the operator of such a large platform, Amazon has a responsibility to the US economy.
Curious on your thoughts about Kroger/Great Value/Archer Farms (Target) brand items? At least Amazon marks them clearly as house-brand, Archer Farms is practically camouflaged at Target among the brand names, and it's placed pretty prominently too.
Personally I think it's hard to draw a distinction between the two cases - either they're both fine or they're both not. My line would be closer to: if Amazon noticed a certain thing was selling really well, created their own version of that thing, and then de-listed the original thing from their store, that seems like the point at which it becomes anti-competitive to me.
Store brands are an age-old practice so it's interesting to revisit them in the context of mega-corps like Amazon. Although WalMart+Great Value is probably a similar scale.
While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.
It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.
Which is still the same in the Target example where their own brand product get much favourable placement. This practice has been going on for so long possibly before all of us on HN were born.
It is a tactic often used in dispute, that is why Brands needs to work on Branding to combat this stronghold from Distribution. And one reason why small brands likes the Internet so much rather than working with conventional distribution channel.
A direct comparison would be target putting your product behind their product on the shelf where the shopper can't see it without digging for it.
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/7/17208804/amazon-private-label-b...
cruelly -> actually
Walmart and Costco do it too, should that it be banned when customers get the product at a cheaper cost?
Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans.
The problem is abuse of power without oversight.
YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can.
People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable.
That's what antitrust protection is really about.
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.
==since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.==
Over what time frame are they better off?
Are workers (also people) better off?
No, but any supposed other benefits that outweigh prices getting higher are even harder to measure, so basing government intervention on them is even harder to justify.
> Over what time frame are they better off?
Um, whatever time frame the prices are lower?
> Are workers (also people) better off?
If they have to spend less on what they need, it would seem so.
“Spend less on what they need” is same Walmart argument we’ve heard for decades. Meanwhile, the middle class shrinks and many of the things people need to improve their lives (shelter, healthcare, education) get more and more expensive and wages stagnate.
I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.
Standard Oil didn't have a "counterfeiting problem", so I don't see how this is relevant to them. Or, for that matter, to any other large monopoly that has been broken up by antitrust action.
Also, you as a consumer might judge that, for example, you don't trust Amazon to deliver the product you want in a certain area, regardless of how low the price is. That's fine. But that in itself is no argument for breaking up Amazon in an antitrust action. It's just an argument for not trusting Amazon for certain types of products.
It seems like there aren’t any middle-quality products anymore: you can buy a cheap plastic item that never works quite right and will break next month, or you can buy a chrome-plated showpiece item that costs too much. Where’s the non-disposable, ugly, bulletproof utility version these days?
I think there still are, but I agree it's very hard to find any on Amazon, at least in a lot of product categories. You have to spend time trawling actual brick and mortar stores.
The problem is abuse of power without oversight
This is exactly how I feel about me dealing as a business with the big corps. But I did not actually had this experience myself. Reason is simple: I just do not engage. As a business I do not uses any cloudy stuff at all. Everything I do I host either myself or on rented servers that I could change on a moment's notice. No Youtube, no Apple app store, no hosting my software using Azure/Amazon/etc, no Github (I host my own), no Gmail etc.etc.
Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation?
Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.
what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor).
additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed.
as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.
Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...
Economists are quick to point out that the new money which is created of of thin air is not given outright, but rather, it is loaned out - Therefore, by virtue of having to pay it back, corporations do not have an unfair advantage.
I disagree with this conclusion because an entity's access to loans is based almost entirely on how much collateral they possess - This necessarily implies that those entities which have more capital are able to take out bigger loans and thus derive more profits from these loans.
For example, if you have $100K in a particular asset (e.g. stocks), you can use that as collateral to borrow an additional $100K and you end up controlling $200K worth of assets in total. So if the yield on those assets is 10% per year, you will end up getting 20% per year relative to your own capital. 20% of $100K is $20K.
So according to this principle, a company which has $100 million in assets can borrow an additional $100 million - This means that an asset class which can generate 10% yield can be bought on leverage to generate 20% yield on the initial capital. 20% of $100 million is $20 million. This means that $10 million of that profit was derived entirely from credit which was printed out of thin air by banks. That $10 million is free money and was given solely on the basis of existing capital.
This is why the rich get richer; it has nothing to do with value creation. Whenever banks print money out of thin air and inject it into the economy, everyone in the country who receives a salary in that currency ends up paying for that equally because of dilution in the value of their salaries. In effect, this means that, salary earners and small capital owners are subsidizing big capital owners. This is what is fundamentally unfair about our financial system and why big corporations have to be limited; they're not successful because they're efficient, they're successful because they own more capital than everyone else and can thus access most of the newly 'printed' fiat money.
Most of us just don't get to borrow 100 million, good credit ain't cheap...
That's debatable. If I want a specific book, sure. But Amazon simply cannot replicate the experience of browsing a bookstore looking for an interesting book to read. I cannot physically hold the book in my hands, flip through it's pages, maybe read a few excerpts, etc. And if I'm buying a used book, I can't inspect the actual condition myself before purchasing.
For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it? I think not.
Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
What's that meant to mean? I use firefox, and I don't even see any suggestion anywhere on any Google properties to use Chrome, though there used to be something on the front page. Certainly never seen anything in gmail.
I agree that gmail is a disaster for people running their own email servers, though.
Sure you can, you can set a negative price such that you pay a user for using your service which bing literally does [0].
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/search-and-earn
Look at the current pricing of medicine in US! Instead of going after those they decide to go after Amazon and Google. US is a place that many living outside of it could never quite comprehend.
If the consumer market wanted an alternative, wouldn't there be competing companies by now that would ingest all that data and give you matching mail, docs, video, etc, services?
On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly.
Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competitors fighting for the last 20%.
Internet advertising may not be a majority of all ad spending, but Google is an internet ad company, not a general ad company. It would be like arguing the old phone company wasn't a monopoly because plenty of communication was still by mail or in person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car.
What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful?
Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.
The issue is that a lot of people talk up "innovation" in the tech industry, that isn't. For every person who makes a better car, lots of people make the same or worse cars.
As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away.
ha, obvs protobuffers. [hides from thrown tomatoes]
Microsoft would also [1] own the internet. Their browser IE would be the only significant consumer share, there would be no Mozilla, no open source browser. So no incentive to open the browser up to plugins. Microsoft would hold all the information on consumer browsing habits. Would they permit other search engines? Unlikely if there is no antitrust regulation compelling them to do so.
But that was then. I think your premise is, we more or less have all the software technology we need why do more, unless it comes from an incumbent, in the form of incremental improvements? Why shouldn't Apple, Google, Microsoft shut down their app stores a little more? Keep the development in-house. What's the point of allowing this creative destruction from 3rd parties? More and more, we only get these increasingly tired, corporate innovations. Fewer ports on computers in the name of locking down devices to make them less 'hackable', more restrictions on these OS that increasingly feel like sandboxes, because why bother giving users the unfettered ability to create stuff, it just allows more creative destruction. Why should corporations knock it out of the park when they can just suppress upstarts with unfair competition?
By the way, antitrust regulation also prevents [2] Apple, Google, Adobe etc suppressing developer salaries. Remember antitrust law also shares incentives and motivation, to encourage progress.
But the better question is what is the future without without creative destruction, without shared incentives and competition? We have the answer in thousands of years of monarchies. Monarchies are a stagnant form of human development, they have no incentivize to upset their current order so they constantly suppress change. We don't celebrate this ancient monarchy or that one, like we do federated political systems. Compare the cultural developments in ancient Greece's federated city states vs surrounding empires. Or the Roman Empire, when it was ruled by the Senate, before emperors ran it into the ground. Or the Gutenberg Press, that brought printing to the European states where publishers were incentivized by profit, compared to dynastic China that developed the technology hundreds of years before, which helped trigger the Renaissance. Or Britain after the Glorious Revolution broke the monarchy's monopolies and led to the Industrial Age. Or the Jamestown settlement after it began profit sharing to motivate the colonists, in the face of failure, which directly lead to the political institutions which created the United States of America. Without power sharing, all civilizations degrade into inheritance systems, where opportunity is few and far between, unless you go rogue.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0
Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money.
On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn.
I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to?
Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?
And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.
Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.
The #3 browser (Firefox) is (was?) massively funded by a half-billion-per-year agreement from the #1 browser's maker (Google) to add Chrome as the default search engine.
Sure, they could pull that deal. Unless you think it's a perfectly balanced deal, though, that feels like one for-profit company gifting traffic to their competitor (either Google giving money to Firefox, or Firefox giving traffic to Google).
It's more niche, but a lot of companies in my market donate to or fund their competitors for the sake of innovation and growing the pie.
Contrary to popular belief, for-profit companies (even those with scary board members in a competitive market) don't inherently have to be cutthroat.
Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:
> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point was completely overlooked by the court"
But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.
That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?
No, not "only".
The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.
Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.
> If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power
So? In the real world, antitrust isn't about how a company became dominant. The fact that a company is dominant is what matters. Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing. Google's success, its market dominance, is the very harm that antitrust is meant to address. How Google got there isn't relevant.
If the government deems an organization too big, there is always something on which to hang the prosecution hat. Price fixing, tying, vertical restraint, dumping... they will find something.
Isn't that what government is? One entity running the market?
Governments don't like competition.
Whether it is one entity or many, what matters is the welfare of the consumer, which includes allowing competition to arise that can do better.
And at the same time, they're taking steps to make it more difficult for Ad blocking software to be integrated into Chrome.
I'm glad they don't feel the need to bully other search engines out of existence, but that might have more to do with where their revenue comes from than any particular corporate morality.
> For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it?
You don't see the tight integration between Google's Advertising business and YouTube as a particularly unfair advantage? Are you sure they haven't operated at a loss on some or all of the product in order to bully smaller competitors out of the market?
Aside from the frontend code and the CDN, what is YouTube other than the advertising and other third-party integration anyways?
Googlebot was allowed to its thing pretty freely back in the day on the assumption that Google will remain a search company only and will not step on the toes of the companies whose websites it was parsing. That proved out not to be true.
What's more, if today I want to parse Google's web properties (let's say its GoogleMaps data) the same way that Googlebot used to parse the websites of the companies I used to work for I'll get banned almost immediately.
Android isn't iOS where you're not allowed to replace the browser at all.
“Upgrade to a safe browser”.
They always use their monopolies (video, search, maps) to venture into different markets.
Not sure about that considering how many startups they buy each year
Coincidentally, this is also how legislation was implemented in this country until 1980s. Which is to say - this is what we did back when our economy was both prosperous and stable.
For a good example of just how much teeth anti-trust used to have before it got Borked, read this court opinion in one case from 1962: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...
We will see though.
Don’t you find it strange that a Republican administration is going after a company for anti-trust?
I am not saying that Google hasn’t unfairly competed against small business or they shouldn’t be sued, but this is purely political, not the Justice Department all the sudden caring about the little guy.
Nope. If anything, there is past precedence from the 2001 Antitrust case against Microsoft [1]. Note in that case, it wasn't about whether consumers were directly harmed, but whether Microsoft was abusing its market power to prevent other entrants into the browser space. Arguably this is very analogous to what Google and Facebook are currently being accused of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
>Nope. If anything, there is past precedence from the 2001 Antitrust case against Microsoft [1]. Note in that case, it wasn't about whether consumers were directly harmed, but whether Microsoft was abusing its market power to prevent other entrants into the browser space. Arguably this is very analogous to what Google and Facebook are currently being accused of.
The President, March 16:
>The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12616266746864476...
Well, no government wants any company to wield more power than them, right?
/tin-foil hat off
Can you share some instances of this being true in the 80s?
And google has arguably the best information in the world since identifying specific people is their core business.