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Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
691–700 of 735 posts
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought, clearly expressed in Elizabeth Warren's post, is that Amazon et al are stifling innovation by discouraging entrants and using dominant positions in adjacent industries to crowd out competitors. This isn't a new idea—it's one of the pillars of antitrust.
They're not stifling innovation. Their successes have had massive spillover effects helping other companies to innovate. The Golden Goose is still laying eggs. This isn't Standard Oil. It's not Ma Bell. When they stop innovating and start extracting rents we can have a reasonable conversation about breaking them up.
All I can say is that a lot of people disagree with you. If you're interested in that perspective, a good book is "World Without Mind" by Franklin Foer.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, does the public have the image of Comcast and Verizon CEOs as being specific people who are really rich and dislikable? So that taking them down a notch will make the public happy? And so taking them down a notch is a good political stance? To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people alre…
> What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level. Well, sure, 100% national market share is obviously a monopoly. But you're also a monopoly if you distort a market (generally markets with less than 3 major players) or have control or distortion over individual markets (you can have a monopoly in NYC but not the US, for e…
>I think this obviously applies to telecoms, which often have monopolies over certain areas (and often granted by local government! thanks a lot Philly city council).
That's a key distinction. Are there any actual monopolies (I don't mean companies that are merely dominant) that are not backed by government?
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#694Earlier 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…
Taxes don't solve these problems. In your setup, companies would "break up" but only on paper to take advantage of tax code. Outside of papers filed in Delaware no one would even know these were separate companies. Many billionaires often have few 100s LLCs filed in such a complex graph of ownerships that would take days to decipher.
> Taxes don't solve these problems. In your setup, companies would "break up" but only on paper to take advantage of tax code. Outside of papers filed in Delaware no one would even know these were separate companies. Many billionaires often have few 100s LLCs filed in such a complex graph of ownerships that would take days to decipher.
An essential point any plan like the GP's would be to make conduct like you describe illegal, and make sure those laws are adequately enforced and have enough teeth to be a deterrent.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google... Lobbying is tracked and google spent over 33% more than Comcast - in your own words - bribing members of Congress. The bulk of Google’s lobbying expenditure was for immigration, tax reform and antitrust. I’d say Google’s far better “at playing the game” after all no one is randomly sticking up for Comcast.
Google learned from Microsoft's mistake. You pay your bribes or the justice department comes knocking. Google made antitrust investigations just vanish into thin air.
I am puzzled to this day how IE + Windows was a monopoly but Android + Chrome is not.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original poster asked what benefit breaking them up would have, they didn't necessarily ask for a benefit that's something lots of Americans would see as positive. America and its technology companies aren't super popular in many parts of the world in recent years, and people unfond of it would welcome progress in AI technology becoming less concentrated in the US. Maybe a more left-leaning Senator like Warren mi…
I don't mind spitballing a bit here. I'm definitely left-leaning economically. I also am very much in favor of giving developing nations a chance at competing with our economy. However, I would go more or less the opposite direction of what you're suggesting. I support allowing American companies to produce jobs on foreign shores _provided those companies follow American labor laws_. I'm in favor of pro-labor regulat…
>All this to say, I wouldn't really call what you're suggesting a benefit by any view.
It's certainly a benefit from the view of the Chinese government.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
"But we need to do X first!" is not a good reason to not do Y, a different-but-still-good thing. All of these companies need to be broken up, and the Department of Justice Anti-Trust division has enough employees to do it. These monolithic companies are sucking up all of the power in our economy and have destroyed the competitive markets. As the Economist recently said "Profits are too high. America needs a giant dos…
Splitting up "monopolies" won't create competition, especially in the case of vertical integration. What would help competition is intellectual property reforms, deregulation, tax simplification, occupational licensing reforms, etc. But almost everyone weaving the "evil monopoly corporations" narrative explicitly ignores practical policies that address those.
I agree that the primary cause of all this is government interference regarding barriers to entry. However, did the regulation help insulate these companies against competition in the first place or did they use their money and power once established to pass laws that would keep competitors at bay? Lobbying reaps disproportionate rewards---those CEOs who stick by their non-rent-seeking principles are leaving big money on the table and will likely be replaced by shareholders. (Econ Talk had a good podcast on this recently.)
Regarding trust busting, it is worth noting that these tech giants give an immense amount of money and support to the left. Might as well give Warren some bipartisan support so we can thrash them a bit---it would be sweet poetic justice to attack these statist zealots with the very government power they worship.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Taking morality out of it for the time-being, taxes serve as an additional barrier to entry for smaller companies; these tech giants have hordes of lawyers and accountants to make sure they pay very minimal taxes (if any). These companies are also multinational, so they can keep money overseas and search for tax havens globally---a choice smaller companies don't have.
The point is: you can give big companies whatever rate you want, but they're in the strongest position to circumvent it, and they will. The better choice is to lower taxes substantially and give the smaller companies a chance to accumulate capital faster, so they can compete.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can replace Google/Amazon/Facebook in seconds. You can not change your cable provider in a large number of areas, and even many of the ones that you can, you only have 2 choices between Comcast/Verizon/ATT/Centurylink. And, miraculously, as soon as a competitor arrives, you see prices drop and speeds increase. It happened in just about every area Google fiber rolled out to. Comcast also charge $10 for an extra 50…
> You can replace Google/Amazon/Facebook in seconds. This is largely false: look at market share of all their competitors — network effects are really hard to replace.
People said the same thing about AOL, Yahoo, and Myspace