We need to get away from this nationalist perspective. All of these companies are global companies, both in where their products are designed/developed, as well as where there users are.

You wouldn't pit one state against the other and say "we need to keep California founded monopolies in place or else Oklahoma might end up replacing them".

We're all in this world together. Yes there are cultural differences, but we need to shift our mentality to a global one.

I know some people will call foul on China, but remember they sued Alibaba for monopolistic practices https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/china-fines-alibaba-in-anti-... - all is not as it may seem on the surface.

Recognition on my part there are other issues to consider in China and many other countries, which is why we're looking to Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico and other location for our company. Legislation is slow, action is faster.

> You wouldn't pit one state against the other and say "we need to keep California founded monopolies in place or else Oklahoma might end up replacing them".

That’s totally something my local leaders would say. States compete for business here.

Practically speaking, my vote influences how US companies operate more than it influences how foreign companies operate. Therefore, all else being equal and since monopoly implies no other choices, I’m more invested in the companies I interact with being American rather than, say, Chinese.

That's a really interesting perspective, but does your vote really influence how companies operate? On what level?

For us, and we're about to start producing hardware, we think our purchasing power is more influential than our vote. That's why we're avoiding China for manufacturing.

I'm highly skeptical of that prediction. The EU are hardly slouches with respect to anti-monopoly actions. Chinese and Russian companies are subject to intense fear-mongering (not that every criticism is invalid) and are unlikely to take the place of FAANG. And I don't foresee other Asian, African, Middle-Eastern, or companies from UK or the Americas achieving huge monopolies before actions could be taken against them.

Chinese entities seem to be treated like a special case / emerging market/industry, by even the most senior E.U. member states. This is in contrast to the U.S. / U.S. entities, which are viewed / treated as a mature (i.e. low/no-growth) market.

The linear outcome of this ongoing state of informal submission is a rise in effronteries / audacious behavior at the official, international level, such as https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wi...

"China has said it will not accept a ruling against it in a key international legal case over strategic reefs and atolls that Beijing claims would give it control over disputed waters of the South China Sea.

The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favour of claims by the Philippines and is likely to increase global diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in the area. By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling from the permanent court of arbitration effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing “nine-dash” line that stretches deep into the South China Sea."

Five years later, it appears the case was quietly forgotten by all.

* * *

Or how about this, more recently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...

"... members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website [...] In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes - using the French term EHPAD - had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die."

Well, US official policy is that they do not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, or any other international court, over US citizens or the US state. This has been seen with a few trials for war crimes, most notably the trial they lost (and ignored) for mining Nicaragua's ports, a clear violation of the Geneva convention, an explicit war crime.

As an EU citizen, whether I'm kowtowing to Chinese or US imperialism is not all that different. Sure, I'd much rather live in the US than China, but in recent history, US influence outside their borders has been much, much worse for those under their heel than has Chinese influence.

What do you think about ByteDance? The crown jewel of social media no longer belongs to the US.

TikTok is a curious one. The Chinese service appears to be a completely separate content silo. And Musical.ly grew in the US without needing antitrust action against FB or Snap or anyone else, in the same way that those companies displaced others. The bar to entry to that marketplace is already low, I don't think it's really relevant to discussions around Amazon or Google or MS or even Apple.

Great points. Social media is a different beast compared to Amazon/MS/Apple but seeing a CN company crack the US advertising duopoly (F/G) is interesting. And I do wonder how much of that pertains to the Musical.ly acquisition. Now, I'm trying to think about the discussion as it pertains to the AAM slice of GAFAM and the conversation gets more interesting for me there.

I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.

Are you referring to TikTok as the crown jewel? I don't see how that description fits. Regardless:

* Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features).

* What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok.

* If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it.

I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).

EU doesn't tend to break up big companies though, just regulate and negotiate with them.

The point is that EU regulations may prevent the creation of monopolies in the first place, so EU countries are unlikely to be a source of alternative monopolies to the existing US ones. So there's cause to think it unlikely that we'd be trading a "devil we know" that is at least partly accountable to US institutions, for a "devil we don't" that is less/not accountable.

I assumed people generally thought the opposite was true - if you let them grow fat and bloated US tech monopolies will lose their ability to compete internationally.

Relative to its size, the highly consolidated US car industry isn't a great exporter, for example, and even required bailouts to survive.

So this assumes that most of the the prospective component companies themselves are not very competent, and that their size and leverage from the dominant units is all that gives them market power.

That, I think, is probably a pessimistic view - Gmail being split off from Google Display Ads and Google Search wouldn't make me any less likely to use Gmail, say. But it would also open the door for US companies to replace them, not simply foreign ones. It's not like countries that crack down on the US services have produced many better companies good enough to compete in the US to date.

I'd accept the risk of some new dominant players from other countries in exchange for limiting the risk of misuse of market power and increasing the chance of new US competition to arise. Competition from inside or outside the US should make the encumbents better. Stagnation is what will let them be replaced by disruptive newcomers.

EDIT: I think a more likely risk is that we lose some money-losing "free" services that are basically loss-leaders, maybe even some vanity project ones. I would LOVE to replace some of those with paid products that a more healthy company could grow around, with better user-facing incentives.

Great! As a modern resident of planet earth, I’m not opposed to international competition. I’d love for FAANG not to be able to crush or acquire competitors, regardless of their country of origin.

I bet, based on recent history, that most of the upstarts would be from the US. If that isn’t the case, it will be a wake up call and hopefully the US will rise to the occasion.

Nationalism aside, there is a common refrain on HN comments that breaking up companies will result in a decline in innovation. History suggests otherwise:

The last company broken up was AT&T; at the time everyone was worried about Japanese electronics companies.

> breaking up AT&T in 1982 was the best thing that could have happened to America. AT&T's core project in 1982 wasn't fighting Japanese electronics companies: it was suppressing the growth of the internet in the USA

> Antitrust enforcement isn't an economic drag, it's an economic STIMULUS

Source: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nin...

Don't you think monopolies are bad, though? Maybe they're convenient, but it's better to spread wealth around, right?

What if the result of breaking up US monopolies is their replacement by non-US monopolies?

How is that better?

I'd think very, very hard about crippling US companies in a global marketplace. So far, I don't even see any discussion about it.

If foreign monopolies take over then the US government should ban or regulate them in the same way that domestic companies are regulated. Foreign monopolies may (or may not) dominate global markets, but I think that concern should be lower priority than the health of our own markets and the well-being of our citizens.

So are we going on to put up a great firewall preventing you from using Tencent?

Seems very unlikely.

Considering how many of those big tech companies rely on pushing ads, does it really matter whether they’re based in the US or not? Either way, they’re revenue is from selling out their users.

For tax reasons , probably yes.

> FAANG companies are all American.

If it were more profitable to be based in another country, they would be. As it is, the stability of the US and the porous byzantine tax laws, corruptible politico, et al make the US ideal.

I would never have expected such jingoistic comments to be so popular. Instead of praising American law makers for taking an ineterest in the welfare of the internet and global culture, even at a theoretical risk to their own hegemony, you judge them as misguided and lament their short-sightedness?

Also, as a believer in the free market, shouldn't you welcome competition, both national and international, as a means for everyone to become better at this?

Those FAANG companies occasionally adapt very powerful political stances, putting their best interests ahead of ~50% of the USA. In other words, these are not American companies-- they view themselves as 'above' Americans and don't mind using their weight to try to push policy that benefits themselves.

I'm not disappointed to see them put under scrutiny. I hope big media companies are next.

This sounds like a great conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those cases where incompetence is a better explanation than malice.

Your weirdly omits any reasoning for why you think that is the case.

One possible reason may be integration, which definitely is a factor for Apple, but Google’s is so hideously bad it might as well not exist.

For consumers it’ll be better whether or not the competitors are from the US (as an EU citizen I’d like to see some local options).

> accomplished nothing but enabling foreign replacements.

Couldn't the US President just decide that they should be banned if they don't sell to an American company?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915043052/trumps-tiktok-deal-...

Because this tired old argument has been made far too many times.

These companies have become bloated and become a liability to the US and the dollar... Soaking up all the newly printed money and wasting it on bureaucracy whilst depriving everyone else from capital. Monopolizing user attention for the benefit of other aging, rotten, decrepit, bureaucratic corporations. They were producing big nominal gains through hoarding of newly printed money but rotting the economy from the inside. Good riddance.

If the reserve banks want to restore faith in the US dollar, they have to prove it works.

I think this is a pretty absurd take. These companies are highly profitable and highly visible to the average person, but in terms of revenue, they aren't outliers among the largest companies. They aren't disproportionately impacting "the US dollar".

They are highly profitable because they have an oligopoly over consumers. Consumers are forced to use them and other companies are forced to do business with them. For no other reason than a lack of alternatives. The reason that there are no alternatives is simply because they cannot compete financially... But if they could play on a fair/even playing field, the alternatives would almost certainly win.

Their high visibility is why they are able to soak up fiat from the economy. When the Fed did the trillion dollar stimulus packages, it went straight into these highly visible stocks.

These companies seem to be running a kind of money laundering operation at this stage. I suspect they found a way to keep borrowing large amounts of money from banks in perpetuity and then circulate that money among themselves to pay off each other's debts to inflate revenue numbers (maybe they use shell companies or corporate partners). It seems that there's something not right going on financially speaking. They're not playing on an even playing field as other companies. They shouldn't be profitable but they are; simply because they have an unfair advantage due to having special access to the centralized money printers.

Are you talking about banks or tech companies?

I feel like your comments would make more sense about banks.

It's both. Network effects. Same forces behind both. We have an a monetary system which creates the economic environment and all companies compete and succeed (or fail) based on the rules of that environment.

If the environment was different (e.g. using hard money like gold or Bitcoin instead of constantly printing more), then the game would be radically different and completely different companies (IMO, more socially beneficial companies) would be winning this game.

> . Soaking up all the newly printed money and wasting it on bureaucracy whilst depriving everyone else from capital

The total market cap of all of these companies is far less than the 6-8T that’s been printed in the past year alone, so I don’t see any evidence of that assertion.

> Because this tired old argument has been made far too many times.

Perhaps if people listened, then it wouldn’t need to keep being made.

> They were producing big nominal gains through hoarding of newly printed money but rotting the economy from the inside.

It isn’t obvious how this statement relates to tech companies in any way.

How for example is Apple hoarding newly printed money?