Yes, and not just tech companies. We should break up all mega-corporations.
Should we break up the big tech companies?
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Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple could be included because of their astoundingly revolting behaviour. Microsoft never pulled a "You write a program that runs on windows we'll take 30% of your revenue off the top or we block your sales" stunt. Literally the only thing that has ever made apple less awful than microsoft is their lack of success. I would miss them no more than microsoft if they died in a bankruptcy event redolent with the kind of…
So you think Apple should market and distribute apps for free?
I think they should allow people to market and distribute apps on their own without cutting Apple in on it.
Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#13Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#14Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#15Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#16You can make the point that even in a market economy, the internal economy of a company is communist: it is centrally controlled/planned and not market base. Outside, big companies can distort the market because of they weight and there ability to use international difference (price transfer, little effective tax paid, lobbying). So I think, if you believe in the invisible hand and that a fair market is good for ever…
J. Bradford DeLong had a piece on the potential for corporations to resemble command economies many years ago; it would be interesting to see a more recent perspective on the topic
http://web.archive.org/web/20090430185843/http://j-bradford-...
Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#17Yes, and not just tech companies. We should break up all mega-corporations.
I'm actually curious about how the current situation arose. We clearly have some historical trust-busting (e.g. Bell, as the article points out), but the concentration of market share in a ton of industries is pretty obviously too high, and basically nothing seems to get done about it in at least the last decade.
It leads me to believe that much broader criteria and lower thresholds should be applied when assessing monopolistic organizations. Honestly I'd even argue that a measure of total organizational complexity or size, like number of employees or percent of GDP controlled by the company might warrant nipping a potential runaway monopoly in the bud.
Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#18Yes, and not just tech companies. We should break up all mega-corporations.
True. Our economic system doesn't set an upper limit on the size or amount of wealth any company/person can reach, and since wealth is made of resources and resources aren't infinite, we have a big problem here. Any company anywhere is going to become a bad player one day because of the lack of such a limit.
Unfortunately thanks to bribery, be it legalized (lobbying) or not, the same people who should implement a limiting system are "discouraged" to do so by the same people/entities they should control, or even worse, they're the same people.
Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they should allow people to market and distribute apps on their own without cutting Apple in on it.
They do though; almost all of my mac apps are from outside the app store.
Oh great. They let people do it in the tiny portion of the market that is normal desktop apps. They still keep a tight leash on the much larger mobile app market.
Re: Should we break up the big tech companies?
#20You can make the point that even in a market economy, the internal economy of a company is communist: it is centrally controlled/planned and not market base. Outside, big companies can distort the market because of they weight and there ability to use international difference (price transfer, little effective tax paid, lobbying). So I think, if you believe in the invisible hand and that a fair market is good for ever…
J. Bradford DeLong had a piece on the potential for corporations to resemble command economies many years ago; it would be interesting to see a more recent perspective on the topic http://web.archive.org/web/20090430185843/http://j-bradford-...
Thanks for the link!
This passage stuck out at me:
"But we were all told a decade ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, that hierarchical organizations simply did not work as modes of organizing economic life--that you needed a market in order to achieve anything better than low-productivity, bureaucracy-ridden economic stagnation.
What, then, are all these large corporations--ATT and IBM, General Motors and Toyota, Microsoft and USX--doing? What methods of corporate control have saved them from turning into smaller versions of the unproductive Soviet economy?"
Given some of the tales of corporate excesses that I have heard, I would answer... absolutely nothing.
Thankfully we are still far enough away from the situation where a few megacorporations dominate our everyday lives (as worrying as the recent trends are) that society at large is shielded from this.