This.

Also add most major telcos, ISPs and airlines to the list as well.

We love capitalism. It’s basis is competition. Let’s get us some of that.

and the big 4 banks, and walmart, and a bunch of other industries. we're in a monopoly age.

Why don’t we target the 6 (or however many) companies that own 95% of everything in the media?

Unless they’re reined-in, progress will be elusive; their megaphone must be silenced!

And media companies...

Especially the media companies! They put artificial limits on the range of acceptable thoughts, acting as both a muzzle and a noose around the neck of the public.

Yes because there is absolutely no way for you to get your thoughts to people worldwide without depending on big media…

Parler

Strawman in any case, having a technical option doesn’t negate massive horrible effects on the public.

So it’s a straw man that anyone can’t just set up a blog or do podcast and publish their ideas?

It’s a strawman because GP wasn’t commenting on whether or not there is a technical way of reaching the public, but rather that media consolidation hurts the public. Those are orthogonal issues.

It’s not orthogonal, consolidation of media is only important if it keeps people’s messages from getting distributed broadly. Is that really a problem in 2023?

The “media” - ie ways to reach people is less consolidated now than any time in history.

I can invent a new protocol and app right now thats 100x easier to publish on and access. No one is using yet, is the harm of propaganda stories in corporate media lessened in any way by the fact of that tools availability? No

You don’t have to event an app. You can set up a web server in your own home to get your views across.

In fact, you don’t have to do that. You’re getting your views across right now.

Yes, that doesn’t mean the corporate media doesn’t have a huge amount of influence due to their consolidation. Technical ability to communicate is not the only factor in power of reach. I’m not sure how else to explain it.

And yet, without any media support, civil rights leaders were able to effect change in the 60s.

Maybe people these days are just lazy?

Maybe they're just propagandized to death and don't know what they don't know.

Right because in the good old days, people weren’t propagandized to think it was dangerous for Black and White people to drink from the same water fountain or go to the same school, that gay people should go to jail (“anti-sodomy laws”) and that it’s a sin against God to allow interracial marriages (laws against miscegenation).

Not to mention the whole era of McCarthyism

Oh but remember: "Bigger is better!" and "Economies of scale"/s

Capitalism is based on competition, but the rules of said competition are largely written by the winners of said competition - this isn't a perversion of capitalism, this is capitalism as it has always functioned in reality. Like, oil companies get significant political sway over our policy on climate change, which is why over the last 40 years, the biggest sources of emissions reduction were the 2008 GFC and the 2020 lockdowns.

The #1 reason why Comcast hasn't been ousted by local community fiber networks is because Comcast politically lobbied to make it illegal. This is normal. The solution is to cut the moneyed interests out of politics as harshly as possible, because otherwise we'll always require the permission of junk-food companies before we limit how much sodium is permitted in kid's food.

Lobbying needs to be rate-limited to match what individuals can say.

Level the playing field by making the largest possible political contribution equal to a multiple of the minimum wage which one could reasonably expect someone earning that to donate in a given year, then require that each contribution be made using a check or money order mailed with a hand-written note in a first-class envelope.

I object a lot less if the trustbusters don’t stop with tech and apply their hammer equally to other industries, agree with telcos/ISPs (I’m not sure how uncompetitive airlines are, they seem really low margin). I haven’t really seen evidence that Khan is interested in going after non-tech companies though. (Would love any pointers to the contrary.)

You have to add Microsoft to this list unless you live in complete denial about the massive monopoly that they have in office IT. And they are actually the first that should be broken up, splitting the office suite from everything else.

Microsoft should be the first one to be split up. Their dominant position is more pervasive than any other market because the operating system people use in their computers is the gateway to get too these other services.

The second should be Apple for the same reasons.

Then Amazon.

I fail to see why apple should be split.

Nobody forces people to buy macs, very few do, and as for iPhones, there are alternatives and apple doesn’t have a monopoly over the phone industry.

You can very well use icloud on other OSes too.

Apple doesn't even hide the tax.

The shit they get to pull with safari is beyond IE level - they straight up don't allow alternative browsers (beyond WebKit) on 50% of mobile market.

Not for long (* insert EU flag here *)

you can't use 99% of apple services on Android. no apple maps, no find my, no iMessage, no apple calendar, no reminders.

nobody forces people to use windows either, but yet a company having 60% of the global phone market is pretty comparable considering that's literally probably more phones than people actively using windows daily

If Apple had >5% desktop market penetration, you’d have a point.

They should definitely open up iOS to installing apps outside the app store, but their position isn’t nearly as abusive as Microsoft’s. Even their 50-60% share of the mobile market is pretty competitive compared to Windows.

Make corporation tax progressive, resulting in it being easier for small companies to compete with big ones, without requiring the government to decide what is and what isn't a monopoly.

Highly fragmented markets are also bad for price discovery - so how do we know what size to have?

We are so incredibly far from highly fragmented I don’t think that’s even worth thinking about at this stage

If you don't think about it, could create a weird set of local/product/etc. monopoly like things instead. Not thinking about isn't an option because it ignores the incentives if you force limit sizes.

Yes definitely agree a hard limit on sizes doesn’t make sense, but I just think it’s not going to be a problem any time soon with the current state of affairs in the US economy.

I honestly think that this is underestimating how good companies can get in optimization their positions. The smaller companies would inherit these abilities from their "parents".

I read an economics paper a while back that said you need at least four players to get a competitive market.

I’m not sure how you would translate that to limits on the size of a company though as every sector would be different.

I think we need to seriously think about market design at some point. Relying on more actors alone is not a great strategy.

At the very least a line can be drawn when a company cross-subsidizes a barely profitable enterprise to the tune that they're drowning out competitors, or when they exploit workers so absurdly insane that they're forced to resort to piss in bottles because the algorithm penalizes them for taking a civilized bathroom break. AWS makes boatloads of money on AWS and uses that to stay afloat with shipping stuff.

Why? You seem to be expressing outrage, anger, or frustration, but you're not giving the rest of us anything to think about.

All of them enjoy market domination in their respective areas of expertise. Their size makes them effective monopolies and their behavior has many times ruled anti-competitive. Competition between them is insufficient and they have been convicted of organizing in monopolistic manners before.

For consumers and the market as a whole it is more healthy if they are broken up into smaller companies.

Even if they weren't near monopolies in their respective fields, I think we should be wary of permitting the sort of concentration of power that arises from the existence of trillion dollar corporations.

Do exactly how do you plan to beak them up? How would you divide them up?

Governments' and companies incentives are highly different. I live in Turkey where not every service is corporate like it is in the US. I can see in practice that a competitor service offered by government happens to be that real competition which drags the prices down.

So has the Turkish government created a cell phone? A search engine? A popular e-commerce store?

Only an ecommerce store of that list, but many other things. Though the store doesn't really matter because competition is already rampant in the ecommerce space.

I wrote a letter to our Presidency asking about these other things you mentioned last week.

So would the Turkish government be happy to let you sell something that was pro Kurd?

To me it does feel much worse if one company is singled out. But, yes, bring back the Sherman Antitrust Act with good enforcement.

Personally, I think much of this is in large parts the fault of one party that likes to systematically defund government institutions, so they can say "see big government doesn't work!"