231–240 of 335 posts
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Larger in terms of what? Market share? Revenue? Profit margin? Staffing?
Yes.
I can't tell if you have a reasonably thought out perspective based on your response or if it's just "corporations that are 'big' suck"
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I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share b…
> I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share…
No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too big."
> From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.
So go elsewhere! That's how competition should work. Among your other alternatives are Walmart and Target, which have quite robust online operations.
Amazon is not plausibly a monopoly.
Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the ro…
I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…
In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others.
Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw out the little paper photo that's in it and replace it with yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the trouble and keep the paper?
Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling photo of your family is highly salient.
Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that lets me connect with my actual friends, then my choices are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use. If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event invitations, but let's me receive the actual invitations my real friends send, I sure as hell better be on that one particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly on those events.
Almost every media or information company has thousands of micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need to update our thinking to the 21st century.
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The Justice department has some good documentation. https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
This is interesting because it defines monopoly and market power in terms of prices. How does the traditional monopoly definition fit when we're talking about "free" goods (to the general consumer) like FB or Google search? Is the thought that they exert too much power over ad pricing?
~Antitrust Economist.
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I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…
> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant . Similarly, Facebook has…
Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are none, why is the market definition you have offered the correct one?
This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in their complaint which all revolved around it being "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not persuaded.
~Antitrust economist.
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>They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
Snapchat launched their Android app in 2012. Maybe stories landed in iOS before Android?
Being anti-facebook & anti-google is popular in media circles because they are direct competitors in the advertising space that are eating their lunch. The fact the author does not include amazon, apple or microsoft is telling on it's own. "Cui bono" is something you should always apply to whatever you read.
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I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…
Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.
Yes.
> It's all about concentrated power.
No, absolutely not. There are many activities which violate antitrust law which have nothing to do with "concentrated power". Nor is "concentrated power" something which is banned in antitrust law (because it isn't clear what it is!).
~ Antitrust economist
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…
Your analysis is correct, but the quality of antitrust commentary on this site is not that high! Neither Google nor Facebook is plausibly a monopoly. This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies. ~Antitrust economist.
Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the ro…
What I want addressed is how we can bust these companies without making the experience worse for consumers or making things less efficient. A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search, that'd also be bad. Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopo…
This is a firm being successful, not a monopolist. This is exactly what antitrust law shouldn't (and does not) punish!
~antitrust economist