611–620 of 735 posts
There's zero net benefit in breaking up large companies that are driving innovation and improving consumer experiences. If you don't like the economic result, redistribute some of the growth. Walmart doesn't deserve to be saved by splitting up Amazon if they can't compete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple ways to represent the people and their best interests. It is not always the role of the government to do what is most popular. Raising taxes instead of increased deficit spending is an example of something that is often unpopular, but in many cases the objectively better option.
> Raising taxes instead of increased deficit spending is an example of something that is often unpopular, but in many cases the objectively better option. I don't think that you could get any reasonably representative range of economists in a room to even agree that this is ever a better option, so I think your claim to objectivity is unwarranted.
Beyond that...yeah.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>As a recent example, Net Neutrality involved massive amounts of lobbing and had very clear "pro-consumer" and "anti-consumer" sides This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
It's uncontroversial to say Net Neutrality is pro-consumer on HN because we're the people who know the technical aspects of the concept; it's uncontroversial anywhere people know what it's about. But the point is well made. We can't be breaking up companies that don't do what we want, if they're playing by the rules. The real answer is to change the rules. Warren is running on some populist anger, and that's a danger…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ii that really a thing though? Have we seen tech company lobbyists really push a lot of weight around? Companies that seemed to genuinely support net neutrality didn't seem to have much of any impact / participate all that much.
> Companies that seemed to genuinely support net neutrality Which companies were those? Netflix and google both made statements that they support net neutrality, but I didn't see them lift a finger to do anything about it: it seems to have been mostly a pr move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't about market share. It is about consumer choice. Access to google alternatives are available to everyone. Many people don't have a reasonable choice when it comes to broadband.
Economists traditionally analyze market concentration in terms of market share, not the mere existence of choice. I will point out that you felt the need to qualify "choice" with "reasonable"--because Comcast competes with DSL and cellular almost everywhere. But that some qualifier applies to search. Even in markets where Comcast is the only cable provider, it usually doesn't have anything close to 90% market share,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the middle of the process there was an election and the new executive didn't want to actually go after Microsoft. They then got off much easier than their misdeeds required. At one point an OS/Office breakup was in the cards and that would actually have been a major shift in the industry. It's not surprising that what was actually done didn't have that much impact.
My point is not whether government interference was impactful. My point is exactly that it made no difference. Microsoft lost its position of dominance through purely market ends (in my opinion -- certainly between the US actions and the EU actions you could argue that they made a difference). In retrospect breaking up MS between Windows and Office was not a necessary condition to breaking MS's monopoly, and so we ha…
> In retrospect breaking up MS between Windows and Office was not a necessary condition to breaking MS's monopoly.
Quite the contrary. Since their monopoly is still in full force neither the meager settlement nor the market transformation were sufficient to break the monopoly. Breaking up OS/Office might have been enough but we'll never know.
How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies ? I already don’t use Facebook, I buy things online from places other than Amazon, and have email accounts that aren’t hosted by Google. However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service. Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anti-competition law and it's interpretation has changed drastically in the US after Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978). Reagan administration used it as their bible.
Yes. Broadly speaking, the law went from looking at concentration as a bad thing on its own to only looking at whether consumer prices would be impacted. The prevalent idea now is that mega-mergers will reduce prices because of economies of scale. It also doesn't help that there seems to be academic corruption or at least conflicts of interest driving the new interpretation. https://www.propublica.org/article/these-p…
There's zero net benefit in breaking up large companies that are driving innovation and improving consumer experiences. If you don't like the economic result, redistribute some of the growth. Walmart doesn't deserve to be saved by splitting up Amazon if they can't compete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we had a progressive corporate tax, I think all the problems would sort themselves out. You want to build a trillion dollar company? Fine. Corporate tax rate of 50%. You're a small business with less than $1M in revenue. Cool. Corporate tax rate of 0%. Big companies will break up to take advantage of the tax code. Problem solved. Instead, the bigger you are, the harder you can lobby for tax breaks. Currently, if y…
I agree it should be harder the bigger you are, but it's not the tax rate. Right now, FAANGs either run a 0% profit margin, or book their profits to Ireland. Changing tax rates don't fix either of those.
Sales/Use/VAT tax for payments to wholly owned subsidiaries.