261–270 of 383 posts
While I lament another monopolistic tech giant yet again dodging the most meaningful regulatory consequences of their actions, the more useful meta-question is how these behomoths are now so reliably skirting major enforcement like break-ups. It's not that judges have gone soft or just that the current admin is nerfing enforcement (though they are), this trend goes back much further. The biggest factor is that tech g…
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Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project". >I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars. Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be ma…
Waymo is currently financed by a monopolist and has negligible revenue itself, so it is not part of the free market.
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People used to joke that W was the bottom of the barrel, then the GOP did a hold my beer and dug a little deeper.
Crazy to think there were no GOP presidents between Bush and Trump. I first interpreted this as the new record low is lower than the old record low. But no, Trump was the very next one.
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> is competent enough to go through several warning screens What about "is incompetent enough to press the buttons when the nice man from Microsoft calls about the viruses on her USB"?
She's laugh at him and disconnect. She might not know where the space bar is but she's not an idiot.
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Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project". >I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars. Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be ma…
Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available. As for people who can't drive for whatever reason, they already have taxi apps. And don't think for a second that self-driving taxis will be cheaper in the long term than regular ones, only the margins will go up.
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>What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. Alphabet is rolling out autonomous driving vehicles in many cities around the USA, potentially getting rid of the need to drive a car in 90% of today's use cases. How is this not still an exciting growth story? My kids m…
Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…
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This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success. Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies shoul…
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split. There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
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Microsoft got pretty close to getting broken up in 2000, but settled in time to avoid the split
I won’t lie, I asked Copilot (of all things) first, in order to be more confident I wasn’t forgetting even one breakup, and it also pointed out that “almost” one.