Exactly. My concern is that Google is being uniquely targeted, and that breaking them up and calling it a day just exposes us to further abuses from the rest of the tech industry. At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
Similarly, I feel that the tech industry as a whole, while far from not evil, has emerged with a set of interests distinct from those of other monopolies, and helped protect the internet from being subordinated to the interests of telecoms. Which isn't to say that I enjoy monopolies, far from it. I just want to see similar willpower to break up the giants of other industries.
For that matter, if we really have to go the route of the uniquely targeting a specific tech company, I would at least start with Amazon and then Facebook. Or if we thought more broadly than just tech, I would start with the oil industry giants, finance industry giants, and then telecoms, and then health insurance companies, and then Amazon and Facebook.
I find it interesting that we're reasoning in terms of balance of power, pre-eminence, and hegemony, to address issues related to a few companies. Cardinal de Richelieu sure would have found his footing.
No wonder some Google had a "Head of International Relations" whose job is to deal with diplomats, the U.N and the like[^1]. I believe Condoleezza Rice is also on the board of Dropbox.
[^1]: https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-inter...
Perhaps all this familiarity is finally breeding contempt from certain quarters? Perhaps it’s a bit of envy on both sides; nations envious of multinational profits and reach, and multinational firms envious of national self-justifying existence.
I wonder how long til Starlink starts providing extraterritorial/extraterrestrial VPS?
That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without capital...
[0] https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/who-should-ant...
The thing is, amoral behavior can be seen left and right, through large part of history of Silicon Valley (remember Gates & Jobs & Xerox).
To me as an end consumer, Facebook has a true monopoly and progressively shittier products compared to Google - ads comprising half of my feed, their core product is still broken and buggy in many places but that's another topic. Recent UI changes made it much worse product. Google looks great compared. But again that's very personal and limited view.
So was slavery. Yet somehow we managed to legislate that away.
Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.
We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.
And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.
Telecom and the like are the same, competition leads to fragmentation and destruction of opportunity. Monopolies lead to bad platforms, but platforms that hit the scale divided and broken half solutions never will.
I’m way more concerned by Facebook in terms of monopoly, because here I truly don’t have a choice between products, just to opt out with social consequences. That’s not the case with search or email.
Google is an ad company; their product is an audience and an advertising system. There is no reason that advertising should be untouchable except at scale. There are plenty of tiny players who eke out a profitable existence at small scale with ads. It is likely there is a path from there up into a mega-giant if someone really goes to look for it.
If anything, advertising might suffer diseconomies of scale for most products. Small businesses want to advertise locally.
Advertising is the same way: The more opportunities you have to try matching a person with a thing they might like, the more you'll learn.
Google is on a scale that are likely two orders of magnitude more than their closest competitor.
Hilariously, Google is by far the best at mapping local people with local businesses, as they've mapped most commercial centers, and run heavy machine learning across them to extract information their competitors can't even hope to try for another decade.
Why I pay absurd amounts more for my healthcare, even when I can choose between several different insurance companies.
That's why my power in a massive center in California is completely unreliable here, I've experienced more power failures in the past year in a major city than I did in 30 years in the middle of fucking nowhere Canada.
Because competition makes it work.
That's why Mussolini got the trains to run on time. He also used them to ship all the Jews to concentration camps, but what's a few million lives compared to being slightly inconvenienced?
After Italy switches sides, and joined the Allies, the Germans, who quickly occupied northern Italy immediately started carrying out the Holocaust.
They were not very successful, because of resistance and non-cooperation by Italian civilian authorities. Less than 10% of Italy's jewish population died in the Holocaust. (Compared to 50% of Romania's, 90% of Poland's, 70% of Hungary's, 30% of Austria's, and 90% of Greece's)
The entire purpose of injecting capital in such large amounts is to prevent competition. That's literally the entire point.
The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable, and product/service quality high.
And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets that practice would be welcome.
Can you provide a contempory example of this happening?
Google and Facebook. The two biggest ad auction oligopolies own virtually all of ad-space between them. Is there real competition? No, there isn't.
Apple. More and more locked down, less and less reliable, more and more expensive. Want to move? Want to repair something out of warranty? That's going to be... difficult.
Ebay + PayPal. If one doesn't screw on fees, the other will screw you on fees. Ideally both will screw you on fees. Now with added Etsy, because also.
Amazon. The giant changes its mind because something something ToS violation and leaves you with n figures of dead inventory and a locked pay out. What are you going to do?
Spotify. You pay us for the music, we don't pay the artists. [1]
YouTube. The record companies get income even if they don't have the rights to it, for the bargain price of a robo copyright claim. Because recognition algos are so very complicated and they make such terrible mistakes, so much of the time.
These aren't just monopolies, they're massive market distortions where money is so dense it warps the Internet into stagnant pools of pseudo-inevitability, with a chilling effect on real innovation and creativity.
And that's not even getting into issues of privacy, political influence, and the market value of personal data.
[1] Not technically true, but considering the pitiful pay outs it might as well be.
To be fair, it's not like the major record labels paid artists well when you bought a CD previously.
Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a big business and making all your profit through volume.
It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same time I think customers usually get a better service for a lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing companies (where overheads work out much larger)
Now AMD's managed to claw black some of the market for itself, but it is still at a huge disadvantage compared to Intel. And AMD's only lucky that IBM insisted on two independent OEMs for its PC CPU's and that Intel wanted that deal bad enough.
When it comes to the desktop CPU market itself, x86 has an unquestionable monopoly and no new player can attempt to design x86 chips without getting sued. But without x86 there's no point designing desktop chips in the first place.
Even when it comes to the better margin server market there is a move toward both AMD and custom ARM chips.
For creative work? Not so much.
As for the performance, we don't really know yet. Single core benchmarks of a CPU with low core count may play out differently with tens or hundreds of cores, 5GHz frequencies, active cooling etc. You can't extrapolate benchmarks in a linear fashion.
No doubt the A Series is impressive, however it hasn't really been tested in a "Mac Pro" yet, so we'd have to see.
Then there's the issue of compatibility and I fail to see how Apple plans to break the Wintel monopoly on the desktop. Sure, it may be able to transition to ARM with the Mac, but unless its chips are available to everybody, (unlikely), there's hardly a route I see for Apple to end x86 dominance.
The vast majority of consumers are running Mac Pro level hardware. In fact, most computers that are sold are laptops.
Why would Apple care about “dominance” in the PC market? It cares about going after the most profitable share of the market. It’s not like most PC makers are making money hand over fist selling consumer PCs.
In the server market, both Amazon and Google are creating their own Arm chips for their data centers.
Windows' deployed in places Mac never visited, like the majority of world's government institutions, schools, (Chromebooks aren't big outside U.S. & Western Europe).
You may argue that Apple will have the "high-value" market, but in terms of sheer numbers I don't see them competing with x86 anytime soon.
As for the iPad being "pro", once you're able to develop serious software on the device itself, we may have a discussion, (I am aware of rumors that XCode is present in iPad OS 14, really curious about that). The existing "Pro" apps still lag behind desktop in many areas and no serious programmer or video editor uses iPad OS full time.
To be clear, am not doubting Apple's ARM chips being really competent, just doubt it will unseat x86 on the desktop.
As for ARM on the server, probably eventually it will be the majority, but I'd guess another decade. Current efforts are more experiments than anything.
My fear is also that if something does displace x86, it won't be a clearly superior, relatively open platform to develop for, but rather a patchwork of workload specific vendor ARM chips with entirely proprietary ways to interact with them. In that scenario, I'd rather take x86.
For places that must have bespoke internal apps, a lot of them are moving toward dumb clients and some type of Citrix solution.
In terms of “sheer numbers”, the desktop market is minuscule, the laptop market could easily go to ARM if MS could ever figure out a good transition strategy, and the server market runs Linux where power is big as important as overall power consumption.
Don’t you think that Intel would rather be in ARMs position than what it is now? I don’t have numbers on the server market, but outside of that Apple ships more chips than Intel.
Edit: this was just submitted to HN showing the performance of Intel chips to Amazon’s custom designed ARM chips.
Ultimately you were charged for the "free" bundled software, you just couldn't get a line item break down of how of the bundle price was made up by that "free" software.
Not saying that Microsoft should break down their OS prices by bundled software, or that it makes sense. But without that breakdown you can't make the assertion that "They never pushed up costs".
Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those with access to finance can win.
Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality of products and services—not access to finance, aka money printing—to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they say they support "capitalism."
Prior to its monopolization actions, Standard Oil was a successful industrial capitalism firm: they had better oil refinery tech than the competition which is how they came into having money to re-invest in the first place.
Your examples are nations, not businesses. Obviously the economics of warfare are different: money (and resources more generally) are how you defeat your "enemies."
I'm talking about capitalism, both industrial (Wealth of Nations-style) and modern financial capitalism which is the domain of business and markets, not war.
However all these companies compete on a global stage. You better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take advantage of weakened US companies.
There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft, Qwant).
Sure, they are no Google or Amazon, but they are or were nothing to sneeze at either
I'm also highly doubtful that this is mainly because of anti-trust laws.
A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
> A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
I am not sure that's the case. The EU car companies had overtaken the US car companies, inspite of the above scenarios.
Or the large companies that are repackaged versions of much older companies, with lineage back to the 19th century. Exxon & Chevron, for example, trace back to Standard Oil (1870); AT&T and Verizon (from Bell, 1877), Dow/DuPont (1897 or 1802, take your pick), Citigroup (from Citicorp, 1812). Banking often goes further back: BofA (Massachusetts Bank, 1784), JPMorgan (Manhattan Company, 1799).
Moving cuts of the pie around is a shell game. For sure the US is less regulated than Europe, so labels change more often, but the old money doesn't.
Top? The S&P 500 is riddled with mediocrities and rent-seekers.
17.5%? Five out of five hundred is 1%.
17.5% of the market share.
Fun fact: Nokia now owns Bell Labs.
i.e. EU companies are not as competitive, presumably lack scale for lower pricing, lack scale to invest into expensive R&D
And that's bad for consumers
Google can, and has, change the web single handedly. Other companies and browser-makers have no choice but to follow due to Chrome's enormous market share and Google's massive market change in services.. I wouldn't call that good for consumers.
AMD has significantly better processors at the moment on a sliver of Intel's R&D budget. Innovation is happening at startups and small companies (which are then bought by the incumbents). I highly contest your statement that Google size is necessary for the best consumer R&D.
Why are European companies not competitive? Why not break up US large companies and expect them to be competitive with other global companies
Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-competitive behavior.
I also think that a hamstrung western company will be steamrolled by international companies with significant state backing/support.
This isn’t a simple equation, there are second and third order effects that we can’t appreciate until after the fact.
In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.
I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.
[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.htm...
Toyota, Honda, Nissan - they pretty much dominate global car sales, but that’s because they had a better product.
No they haven’t, not in that way.
Google is far worse than Facebook. The amount of hackers ok with what google does is just sad.
Whereas FB is for social connections, which are often less important to many hackers than access to information.
You're confusing competitive behavior with anti-competitive. When a company throws money at consumers in order to get their business, that's competitive.
Best expressed as: "To turn 100 dollars into 110 is work. To turn 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters is whether they have the legal authority and can show the consumers are harmed.
Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.
We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out for you. GET BACK IN.
<It's a slippery slope to do something once?> <Apples to oranges comparison about Apple, Inc which never had close to a monopoly> <Something about the justification for breaking up a company that's also apples to oranges> <Whataboutism>
<Something about central planning that isn't clear and doesn't apply to monopoly power>
When the biggest complaint that people have about these companies is that their services are too good and too amazing, and that customers love them too much, that no one else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them... Well I think that says something.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.