631–640 of 735 posts
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Netflix, Amazon, Boeing, Verizon, these companies are already dodging the regressive taxation we have. How will we enforce progressive taxes?
Perhaps actually funding and staffing the agencies that enforce it?
To what end? "illegally undermine competition?" She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have? >Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing. There are other things that can be done…
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>Google is, well google. I don't have to use their search engine if I don't want to. When threads like this come up I always wonder how the engineers who worked on Bing must feel. I'd feel pretty disheartened if people had such a low opinion of my product that my competitor was considered a monopoly.
I think Bing engineers laugh uncontrollably when people at HN claims DuckDuckGo is a search engine.
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The tech market would be much different today if they had been broken up. That they're not still the largest tech company in the world is not the same as saying they lost their monopoly somehow. They still have the same monopoly on the desktop OS and more importantly in Office and they still very aggressively maintain those monopolies. There are just other even larger markets today. > In retrospect breaking up MS bet…
That it would be different in inarguable. I feel like I can get on board with the statement that the fact they are no longer the biggest is pretty much equivalent to saying they lost their monopoloy. In a sense they have a monopoly -- they are the only ones selling Windows. But ... even in the desktop/laptop area they are no longer the beast that they once were. And the prevalence of mobile as a platform means that e…
Breaking them up today is debatable and won't happen so it's not worth discussing. But they're still leveraging their monopoly in anti-competitive ways by for example porting Office to Android but not desktop Linux to protect the very lucrative business of selling Windows licenses to corporates. But that doesn't mean that breaking them up 20 years ago wasn't a good idea. I'm saying two things:
1. Had they been broken up back then we'd almost surely have a much better balanced tech industry by now. It has taken us 20 years to get even a reasonable set of tech consumer markets back up, and it's doubtful we'd have even that if even what little was in the settlement hadn't existed. The Internet Explorer mess would have been enough to stifle Google/Facebook/etc for a while longer. The extremely anti-competitive practices of forcing OEMs to always carry Windows on their hardware would have been enough to at least stifle mobile for a long time if not even to hand over a new monopoly in mobile to Microsoft.
2. Saying that the hard slog through these 20 years to recover from such a distorted market is proof that further actions weren't needed (like breaking up Microsoft) feels almost insulting to those of us that had to live through the impacts of Microsoft's actions in the market. The fact that you no longer consider them a monopoly because they've "only" been able to maintain intact their original monopolies is a hard fought win, and should not be taken as evidence that even more anti-trust remedies were not needed.
I'm not by this taking any position on breaking up Google/Facebook/Amazon. As far as I can tell none of those are even remotely close to the level of anti-trust violations Microsoft got up to.
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And if Amazon is broken up, whoever thinks the US will still win the global E-commerce market against Alibaba is also quite high. The rules are changing. We need to think about the geopolitics here as well. We need US companies to win global markets in an era of increased competition.
Alibaba is a great example of why Amazon is NOT a monopoly.
There's precedent to this in the USA. The US Government once passed regulations that caused one of the largest companies in America to break up into three smaller companies. Today those, three companies are entirely independent, employ over 400,000 people combined, and have a combined net work of over $400B. Those companies are Boeing Aircraft (153k employees, $244B market value), United Technologies (202k employees,…
The problem is this type of vertical splitting doesn't solve the problem of large tech companies. It's like treating a burst appendix with a kidney transplant. The problem of Amazon is that it is effectively the only online shopping place, and thus can act as a Monopsony in hiring it's workers for warehouses, splitting AWS out of that doesn't fix that problem. Maybe you could require that distribution centers be owne…
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The problem is this type of vertical splitting doesn't solve the problem of large tech companies. It's like treating a burst appendix with a kidney transplant. The problem of Amazon is that it is effectively the only online shopping place, and thus can act as a Monopsony in hiring it's workers for warehouses, splitting AWS out of that doesn't fix that problem. Maybe you could require that distribution centers be owne…
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…
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Apparently no one around here has ever heard of Standard Oil.
a study of Standard Oil is really instructive. It is not a matter of there being no competition, it's a matter of having such market power that you can dictate rates for your competitors. Standard Oil got paid every time a railroad shipped a competitors oil!
Judging by the downvotes I got for mentioning it, you and I must be the only ones on HN that think so.
There are urgent issues with Google and monopoly, search, chrome, amp, android and youtube and once you combine that with Facebook a toxic predatory surveillance capitalism model based on harvesting and collating private data to build dossiers that is ominous for any free society.
But for the tech community on the frontlines of this project the old issues of Comcast and Verizon unresolved inspite of decades of heated debate are more urgent. If anyone doubted Upton Sinclars famous insight here is the evidence.
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Yes, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Your opinion has no right to exist on any platform. Don't like it? You can move off of it. Bring other people to a platform that goes by rules you like. I don't use Gab, I am not interested in it, but it exists and has rules you may prefer if this hypothetical situation were to occur. I like diverse viewpoints being allowed. It is unacceptable, however, to be so entitled as t…
Is it equally unacceptable to be entitled to try to force companies to hire/fire who they don't want? What about forcing companies to offer housing to people they do or don't like? And what about offering loans? Should companies be forced to offer loans to people, even if they don't want to?
Though, just so you know where I'm coming from, in my ideal world it would be strong social and business pressures that enforced the idea of protected classes, not regulation. I'd support any competitor which was more ethical, but complex issue.