Think of Bell Labs.

Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc.

It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.

That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.

I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.

The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient.

In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation.

That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo.

But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.

From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly doesn't mean it's inefficient.

Depending on the situation, they can be far more efficient then diverse companies, or much less

From an economics perspective, if there is a monopoly, there is no free market, so you can't rely on the market for efficiency. A monopoly can be efficient, but it can also be arbitrarily inefficient and still keep its position.

I was trying to make the point that monopoly isnt defined by inefficiency, either by the technical definition or the colloquial one.

Rality is complex, and few monopolies can be arbitrarily inefficient. I think this is where a lot of the public confusion about monopiles comes from.

If you have the only grocery store or gas station in town, it might seem like there is a monopoly. There is probably a wide leeway to raise prices or be inefficient, but not without limit or else someone would compete.

If Amazon, Google, or whomever 10X'd their prices, competitors would arise.

That's the reason why quantum computing and projects of this type would not exist if you didn't have behemoth companies with extra cash lying around.

You might think it is is inefficient to have a miracle cure for cancer tied up on patent for 20 years, but what are you comparing it to.

A rational company would lower the price if that broadened the market and netted more profit by volume. Drugs aren't Veblen goods.

The impetus for jacking up drug prices is that the market is captive, and those who need the drug will obtain it. That and insurance/government is often the payor.

It's the same reason SAAS took off so much. If you sell the product and consumers are (relatively) happy, now what? They might come back and buy another version in 5-10 years, but how do you generate enough cash flow between now and then to stay afloat?

The time value of money means you want to sell every dose as soon as possible. with a 10% annual return, $1,000 today is better than $2,600 in 10 years.

Additionally, each day that passes, someone else can come in and outperform you or undercut your price.

Can't you say the same thing if you go back 80 years and talk about the smartest minds in the world instead of working on energy for the masses they're working on the atomic bomb?

What is the possible societal-positive outcome of another social media filter? Or improved ad targeting algorithm? Or more attention-grabbing social media feed?

I could have asked the same thing about a weapon of mass destruction 80 years ago. I don't have an answer for how we can use those things in ways to better society. But I'm not convinced that there are _none_.

I don’t believe there is anyone in the general public or who is an expert in any of the aforementioned fields (which have been around for 1-3 decades) that truly believes they are net positives.

Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.

How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.

Ok, and from whom did their money come? They didn’t magic it into existence.

Google spending money that came from advertisers who got it from people buying their products isn’t much different than a research team spending public money, just with fewer middle men and a (generally) lower negative impact on society.

That is ignoring the many moral arguments against targeted advertising, unnecessary consumerism, etc.

Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.

If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation.

To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition.

Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.

It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.

We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.

Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms.

Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)

Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law.

If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another.

The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.