Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose. The assumption here is that megacorps are a competitive advantage. Let's look at a counterexample. Suppose solar manufacturing is a growth industry. China wants to dominate it, so they subsidize it. Is there now a single megac…
I think it'd be helpful to stick with just the military example. (Your comments re Oracle are well taken and I agree) I don't think you've tackled the problem of if we're playing competition and they build nukes, we need to build nukes. It's a zero sum game and the result is nuclear holocaust. Do you disagree with the premise and if not, what is your proposed solution? Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be…
The premise that they did would be something like, Android. Google has 90% market share in search and makes their money from cloud services and ads. They give away Android for free and then tie it to their services through the network effect of the Play Store and remote attestation. Competition for mobile operating systems is thereby destroyed because to compete with Android you'd have to compete with something free while overcoming a strong network effect, and if you somehow started to then Google has billions of dollars to pour into Android to make sure you can't succeed. Therefore their only competition is from Apple, another megacorp. How is your local market for competing operating systems supposed to thrive in this environment? You're screwed.
But you're not vaporized, you're still allowed to have your own laws. So suppose you're the EU, or you're the US and Google is hypothetically a foreign company, but you want to respond in a way other than just getting your own megacorp.
You would have stronger antitrust laws. Contracts to enforce the business models of these companies would be totally unenforceable in your jurisdiction. App store can't be tied to the device or the use of any other services, remote attestation is forbidden because it prevents the user's bank app from working on a competing device, etc. Absolutely no respect in the law for any attempt to enforce vertical integration. Copyright laws that require source code to be distributed to the customer with any software, to aid in reverse engineering and adversarial interoperability. Violations have penalties with teeth, like invalidating the company's patents and copyrights.
Then the small competitors in your jurisdiction have a chance. Someone can make an Android fork that can use any app in the Play Store and fund development by auctioning off the defaults for search engine or cloud services. Android forks which are actually developed as open source instead of just having the code thrown over the wall start to become popular there, and support multiple app stores which also start to become popular. Once they build enough of a network effect, people outside your jurisdiction start to use them. Meanwhile the people in the other jurisdiction(s) still beleaguered by the oligopoly start to look at your market with jealousy and erode support for the status quo there too.
Why do you think Apple is so intent on fighting the Digital Markets Act? It's not a perfect law by any means but the thing it's attempting to do is valid and if it succeeds, Apple is going to have more competition, which they're worried about precisely because it's a thing that could actually happen.
> Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be helpful if you could summarize your political stance in a few short sentences. I'm worried that we'll be hopelessly lost discussing minutia otherwise.
There is always going to be a government, or something that acts like one. To prevent there from being a king, the government has to do two things: 1) Prevent competing governments from forming (of which monopolies or highly concentrated markets are an instance) and 2) Not Be a Tyrant.
The first one in terms of markets is a set of rules that keep market barriers to entry low and prohibit monopolistic practices etc. The second is a set of checks and balances within the government that constrain the thing with a monopoly on violence from itself being used for empire building or private advantage.
Designing this well is, obviously, hard, but nevertheless it's the thing to do.
> I've been here a while and always been a fan of your comments
I spend too much time here.