Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by da_big_ghey on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @04:52PM
(#26007354)
Consider that politicians' only goal is to get re-elected. While the rare exception may exist, that's also true of companies. While governments are accountable in theory, that rarely holds true in practice. I don't think that a "bigger" government, id est one with more regulatory oversight, would help; rather, use the existing court system to enforce what we have. If we lack political will to enforce the existing measures, adding more will not help. A government need not be "big" to have effective court systems and pass some rules on what certain companies can and cannot do.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by arcticbull on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @04:58PM
(#26007438)
Monopoly rules only exist and matter because of the government. It's pretty obvious that even with them, there's a real pressure for consolidation (and that's efficiency of scale).
The natural state of a company is a monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you don't need to worry about getting "re-elected" any more than a despot does.
The free society exists only in the space between these two clashing titans.
One of the ideas behind federalism was that government / the state need not have a monopoly on everything.
Corporate monopolies usually only persist due to two reasons: regulatory barriers or technological stagnation. Both are solvable.
Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by wizzwizz4 on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:55PM
(#26008176)
If not for regulatory barriers, do you really think Bell Systems would ever have lost its monopoly over US telecoms?
It's always hard to talk about history that didn't transpire but yes, due to technological change similar to IBM.
But they controlled all the phone lines, and hence all the broadband – they'd only be ousted when 3G came along, and even then would they really have?
Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by arcticbull on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @06:18PM
(#26008427)
Sure regulatory capture can entrench interests, but there's no reason to believe that in the absence of regulation one big company wouldn't aggregate every major market and just destroy all competition.