Why? That's exactly the circumstances where the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to economies of scale) and a very low chance of monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool their production and supply these devices for a higher profit.
If that were true, "you're in Amazon's kill zone" wouldn't be something VC's say to startups. And yet, they do say that.
How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better".
We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.
Best to nip corpos before they gain more revenue than a nation state and become "too big to fail".
> Costs will be higher
Read it again, please.
well, assuming the scale couldn't be used for the benefit of society and not to milk it dry. but yes probably the best that can have a reasonable chance at success, eventually, maybe.
Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that.
If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company. Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation.
Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.