Re:The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide “Hid...
by theptip on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @11:19AM
(#37766444)
I’m suspicious, I think most people underestimate how hard it would be to split companies.
If you have everyone in the company go dig holes for 24 months, the stock price would tank and much value would be destroyed.
Likewise splitting is a massive effort that amounts to burning resources that wouldn’t otherwise be spent.
Now part of the point is to destroy the monopoly, which reduces company value too. This is a subtle point; we are probably ok with this because implicitly this is profit extracted as rent and which should really go to competitors. We’d probably say the value here is being redistributed.
But the monopoly rent is different from the actual OpEx and CapEx required to restructure. I really want to see even a rough quantitative analysis here before making any commitments.
The approach you put forth here seems maximally complex and inefficient as an end state, FWIW. Shared access is going to be a nightmare to operationalize. Much better to cut at existing business unit org boundaries.
If you have everyone in the company go dig holes for 24 months, the stock price would tank and much value would be destroyed.
Likewise splitting is a massive effort that amounts to burning resources that wouldn’t otherwise be spent.
Now part of the point is to destroy the monopoly, which reduces company value too. This is a subtle point; we are probably ok with this because implicitly this is profit extracted as rent and which should really go to competitors. We’d probably say the value here is being redistributed.
But the monopoly rent is different from the actual OpEx and CapEx required to restructure. I really want to see even a rough quantitative analysis here before making any commitments.
The approach you put forth here seems maximally complex and inefficient as an end state, FWIW. Shared access is going to be a nightmare to operationalize. Much better to cut at existing business unit org boundaries.