it would be great if we could first put a cap on the biggest culprit: government.
This point would make more sense if I could vote for the leadership team at Amazon.
Perhaps. Perhaps initiatives likes these are bound to fail. Not sure how many lives have to be destroyed until people get "statistically significant" results.
The burden of proof is on you. How does this stifle competition? Why can't Amazon own EA? A gut "they'll be too big / successful / profitable" is not enough.
Why would you want to put an upper cap on the size of companies? It feels like stifling innovation and productivity, which will be overly negative for everyone.
In practice, large companies have been able to use their leverage to influence political outcomes and antitrust laws have not been enforced. It's good that we have laws to ensure a free market, but they're not much use if they're ignored.
In this case, I'm not sure that Amazon acquiring a video game company does much to hinder competition. There are lots of indie video games and I don't see that Electronic Arts has any particular technology that locks in customers or excludes other vendors.
As a society we absolutely should be vigilant against concentrations of power, foremost of which are the big tech companies. But when it comes to monopolies, there are more significant things to worry about than this particular acquisition.
From a business perspective that might be partly true. But anti-trust / anti-competition policies are not just to provide a level playing ground for businesses but also consumers. A giant conglomerate might have a higher productivity, but that doesn't mean that benefit will be passed to the consumer unless they have rival businesses to compete with. Competition promotes more innovation and is more socially beneficial to both businesses and consumers than giant conglomerates that just become obese and unhealthy after a point.
What am I missing?
Yes, plenty of annual sports games, though even those evolve over time with different career modes and gameplay. But EA is still making moves in the space.
Once again, how can someone define an 'upper cap', is it market size? Is it revenue, or employee count? Market share? The unintended consequences of an upper limit doesn't seem to me something we should be encouraging.
I could be wrong, it just feels like we shouldn't be restricting everyone because of one bad actor.
Meanwhile, companies that leverage existing technologies in new ways can be innovative with much fewer resources - e.g. your typical web startup.
How would you measure “size”?
EDIT:
What do you mean by "cap" then? Would you force the company to be broken apart into smaller independent companies if it exceeded whatever cap is defined?
Taxes are on earnings though, not revenues (you could be unprofitable and as such, pay no taxes).
Question: so are you suggesting then that just because a company's revenues (I think you mean "earnings") have exceeded X, that they should be completely broken up as a company?
Yes. But I meant revenues. If we want companies to become smaller, taxing their revenue progressively would compell their owners to split them up into independent entities. Think about it as a progressive VAT.
If you can rake in billions using a team of 50 people, that is great, and should be allowed.
Also, a company like Apple should be allowed. What should not be allowed is for Apple to own its entire supply chain (which would not be possible if company size was limited by number of people).
Consulting businesses are literally in the business to resell their employed talent. Their "product" is their employees.
As such, they type of business by its very nature have a disproportionately large number of employees. E.g. Accenture employees 700,000 people, Tata Consulting 600,000.
Do you mean "earnings"?
A company as big as Amazon exists across thousands of communities, and in contexts that don't even include communities. It can afford to harm some contexts while profiting on others, because it is a monolith. That's why when we talk about business law we need to consider more than just the simple economics, because companies can have greater impacts than that.
Anti-competitive laws are just that, they're not about increasing simple metrics, they're about managing the harder to measure externalities of bigger companies like the ability for a market to be competitive, promote innovation, and to make sure customers have enough choice to choose with their wallet.
I'd say they make it easier to make mistakes in reasoning. Just as unilaterally deciding what "we're" talking about is also a mistake.
Positing that Amazon is too big to buy a computer game company is just wrong. This in no way creates a monopoly on computer game creation, which is one of the best industries on the planet in terms of lack of lock-in in the forms of regulation, machinery, or IP law. Have computer, download Godot, get going.
Also, Amazon is a silly company to level that charge at. They in no way control a significant amount of the game creation industry. You may be thinking of Microsoft.
I understand that enforcement is hard as the rule wouldn’t be global, but still curious.