241–250 of 335 posts
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There is absolutely other ways to get between those people in all those cases. That's exactly why it doesn't hold.
You could also walk between point A and point B, but that doesn't mean that rail monopolies aren't a problem.
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…
> and online shopping for Amazon Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes consumer choice a practical impossibility. I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only resorting to it when there's no other choi…
It isn't the job of antitrust law to make sure you don't have to use AWS.
Also: AWS is not plausibly a monopoly at all. It faces competition from a number of other cloud providers AND doesn't have a particularly large market share in cloud services anyway.
~ antitrust economist
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> Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". I'm with you here. > Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition. No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.
You can waste time on semantics or you accept that practically everyone means "company that abuses their overwhelming market power to create friction in the market" when they say monopoly.
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I made a comment recently addressing these very things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867 My contention summarized is that using market share as it has historically been used is not good, because these software-based companies can scale to much greater power than ever before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant market share to wield the same or even less power.
I think you and OP agree. Tech giants are clearly "too powerful" and need to be dealt with, but the traditional formulation of monopoly power is not a good way to deal with these tech giants.
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You can waste time on semantics or you accept that practically everyone means "company that abuses their overwhelming market power to create friction in the market" when they say monopoly.
It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.
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> They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior. This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out in my comment. You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory of the case. I agree with you that all those things are bad, but those bad things just don't flow from monopoly , they flow from some other problem.
Take it up with the FTC and Tim Wu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu ) then, you obviously are more in the know than they are.
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It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.
I mean I agree, just pointing out that you're not really convincing anyone here and complaining about this isn't very productive since you, I, and everyone else here understands what is meant.
Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant". No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive usage in congressional hearings and media. Using confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it confuses the debate.
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> "We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable." I don't understand this; can you explain? I focused on getting data out of the FAANG Data companies. There would equally be regulations on getting it in . If you want to outlaw face recognition, you would make it illegal to add any data about facial characteristics. Or political affiliations, or porn history, etc. etc.
>> "We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable." > I don't understand this; can you explain? handrous expressed my point better than me an hour ago [1] but I'll try to give an answer: I think we should focus on limiting data production / collection altogether rather than try to address data portability (re-using the term used in the first sentence of my parent comment). I agree that we coul…
> "I can see that splitting Amazon in two parts "Amazon Data User" and "Amazon Data Provider" and forcing the former to pay the latter may disincentivize "Amazon Data User" to use your data too much, but it incentivizes "Amazon Data Provider" to sell it so I'm not quite sure where it leads. I also can't see "Amazon Data Provider" as working as an autonomous entity, so I'm not sure splitting quite makes sense."
Right now you have credit reporting companies (which are hardly a model of right-thinking behavior, btw), but don't they show that it's at least financially possible to split the data away from the data users (banks, lenders)?
So I don't think the money objection holds up. A bank right now might like to run ML on every credit card holder in the U.S., but that would either be impossible (Equifax just won't give it to them), or ruinously expensive. So Amazon Data User just won't be able to do all the analysis they do now, or at least they'll be more parsimonious about it.
Now, for the "taint" argument: rules like in legal discovery would have to apply. Amazon Data User has to swear that they don't have the data anymore, and we would rely on whistleblowers, subpoenas, and criminal penalties to enforce it. The fact that Jeff Bezos would go to jail ought to be enough incentive for Jeff to make sure it's gone.
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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?
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You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in spirit. It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up". Amazon, MS, Apple, a…
In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a difference. But if not, requiring an open network akin to the telephone system with standardized protocols might make a difference. AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open p…