Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
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Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#2for further reading on the history of monopolies and the change in approach to limiting them, in addition to the article’s author’s book, I recommend Cornered by Barry Lynn.
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#3Life is good today, people are panicking about tomorrow.
Tech moves too fast, I dont think we will need to worry about a monopoly when FAANG stock starts falling.
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#4BUT the vast majority of buyouts are small and are for the purpose of finding talent, and also the odds of a buyout producing a long-term impact are small. Look at all the acquisitions yahoo has done over the past 2 decades and they, I think, all failed. They bought Mark Cuban's company Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999, which is now a redirect to the yahoo homepage. Which I think makes it the most expensive domain name ever purchased.
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#5I'm reminded of Peter Thiel's take on this
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iG3YKf1...
cached because current link is unavailable
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#6The change can be traced back further, to judge Richard Posner and "Natural Monopoly and its Regulation" (1968) (http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (PDF)), subsequently published by the anti-regulation, pro-monopoly Cato Institute, and earlier, judge Robert Bork, dating to earlier. In the 1960s, see:
"‘Antitrust was defined by Robert Bork. I cannot overstate his influence.’'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/antit...
https://www.cato.org/policy-report/julyaugust-1999/cato-book...
Bork's "landmark" treatise on monopoly remains curiously unavailable at many libraries:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/antitrust-paradox-a-policy-at...
This reflects earlier treatment of monopoly within Libertarian economics texts for popular consumption, notably Harry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, which addresses monopoly by ... dispensing with it virtually entirely:
https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/
Contrast Alfred Marshall, Principles, 8th ed, leading collegiate text at the time, with a 15 page chapter and a multitude of mentions.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149776/page/n4...
Barak Y. Orbach, "THE ANTITRUST CONSUMER WELFARE PARADOX":
“Consumer welfare” is the only articulated goal of antitrust law in the United States. It became the governing standard following the 1978 publication of Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox. The consumer welfare standard has been instrumental to the implementation and enforcement of antitrust laws. Courts believe they understand this standard, although they do not bother to analyze it. Scholars hold various views about the desirable interpretations of the standard and they selectively use random judicial statements to substantiate opposite views. This article introduces the antitrust consumer welfare paradox: it shows that, under all present interpretations of the term “consumer welfare,” there are several sets of circumstances in which the application of antitrust laws may hurt consumers and reduce total social welfare. This article shows that, when Bork used the term “consumer welfare,” he obscured basic concepts in economics....
https://academic.oup.com/jcle/article-abstract/7/1/133/75097...
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#7Life is good today, people are panicking about tomorrow. Tech moves too fast, I dont think we will need to worry about a monopoly when FAANG stock starts falling.
Will AOL Own Everything? By Lawrence Lessig (Monday, June 19, 2000)
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,997265,...
(sadly paywalled)
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#8I'm reminded of Peter Thiel's take on this http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iG3YKf1... cached because current link is unavailable
More durable:
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#9this is a rehashing/summary of the much more in-depth research note by law school student Lina Khan that gained some attention earlier this year: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
changes to the economic definition and legal enforcement of anti-monopoly are one issue, but a general slowdown in the pace of technological innovation combined with globalization/spread of technology is the primary force driving consolidation/horizontal/vertical integration in many industries
Re: Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
#10BUT the vast majority of buyouts are small and are for the purpose of finding talent, and also the odds of a buyout producing a long-term impact are small. Look at all the acquisitions yahoo has done over the past 2 decades and they, I think, all failed. They bought Mark Cuban's company Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999, which is now a redirect to the yahoo homepage. Which I think makes it the most expensive dom…
HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) owns autonomy.com which redirects to their website. They paid $11.7 billion USD for a company named Autonomy in 2011. HP was forced to make a $8.8B writedown on the purchase already the following year, and today nothing but the domain name remains at HPE.