An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

>> I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature.

I agree with you on details, but with Matt on the overall sentiment.

Most thinking on monopolies is pretty flawed, based in legalistic precedent and analogy to near anecdotes. The 1998 antitrust case against MSFT's bundling of IE to kill netscape made sense in regards to precedent (eg IBM) and economic theory. It was never the primary issue irl and the court didn't fix it despite finding against msft.

I don't think a regulator or court can just pinpoint "monopolistic behaviours" and fix it. The MSFT case proves the point. Prosecutors won, but it didn't matter much. IE still dominated. Competition waned for a while. In retrospect, the whole thing seems irrelevant or trivial to MSFT's monopoly as a whole. We are not better or worse of because of the case, probably.

A recent example is Adwords' EU case. Their dominant market share in search and search ads gave them all their minor competitors' data which was used to maintain their monopoly. The court gave google a $1.5bn fine that changed nothing. Now that precedent will be used in the US & EU to go after Amazon. They clearly use their marketplace to gain data for their retail business and skim any cream uncovered by their partners.

Whatever specific anti-competition behaviours prosecutors were able to uncover and prove are anecdotal. They "prove" that monopoly issues exist, but they aren't necessarily the actual problem. Just one specific symptom.

This is the problem. Monopolistic behaviours, individually are 90% under-water, ilegible, hard to prosecute and fixing the narrow issue you have identified and proved in court doesn't necessarily help. Some specific monopolistic behaviour isn't the point.

That said, I agree with Matt at the less specific level. Monopolies are a problem, and growing rapidly. I just think these things have to be addressed very broadly to make any difference. Classify monopolies as monopolies and apply specific rules to them. For example, "the right to be forgotten," cookie laws, data disclosure mandates, user generated copyright violations... all these highly relevant to a Google or FB. They're not as important, and much more burdensome, for the average business. These laws often exist for monopolies. Apply them specifically to them. A lot of the section 230 discussion should (imo) take this direction.

I would even be in favour of a monopolism tax. Own over 20% of the digital ad market, pay an excise tax on revenue. This would encourage competition and diversity, and also makes sense considering that such monopolies generate extra profits at the expense of the economy. Tax all monopoly mergers, or ban them... not specific mergers. IE, FB have a monopolistic position in social media. No mergers for you. Let those acquired companies compete with FB instead of widening its moat.

If a court/legislator is going into the nitty gritty of how the monopoly works, what monopolistic behaviours exist and such... the actions still needs to be broad. If amazon or google are using a monopoly over a (literal) marketplace to secure a monopoly as a supplier to that marketplace.... break that up. Make adwords a separate company to search. Separate amazon's marketplace business from the retail business. Don't let them create a delivery business. etc.

Trying to act narrowly is pointless. Any ruling on the nuances of how amazon uses data from their marketplace business to help their retail business is pointless. Instead, recognize that there's a structural problem. Amazon run the market and also a retail business. They're using that monopolistically. That's a bad structure, and any specific bad thing amazon does within that structure is not relevant. The structure itself is relevant. That's the whole premise of antitrust in the first place.

> MS got news-breaking fine for far less with Netscape before. But, nobody cares in 2020.

Slack did file a complain against Microsoft to the European commission.

And remember that the netscape lawsuit in EU took the good part of 10 years from first complain to sentence.

Antitrust laws are too slow to be effective.

The problem is that you can just starve any competition when you are large enough. Amazon did that with a lot of competitors. On the console market you can it see very clearly, although here two behemoths are fighting it out.

Following Microsofts own statements and that from their sales team, Teams was indeed free to lure more users.

I don't think this particular issue is a problem, but the overall structure of tech enterprises is a problem. At least when it hits consumers instead of competitors at one point.

"We need to find a way to discourage mega-mergers." Why? If YouTube or Instagram didn't get acquired, Google and Facebook would find a way to destroy them just like Microsoft did to Netscape and they wouldn't exist anymore but in essence they are great products and there are no other products like them on the market. Once they get destroyed there is less competition and at least when they are alive you can look up to them for quality of service and motivation to compete.

This is where this kind of companies come into play : https://indie.host [french link]

You have one person to talk to, they manage RocketChat, NextCloud (with an office suite, agenda, files), Jitsi, Discourse, CodiMD, all of this with a single sign on for your coworkers.

All for 10€/month/user.

It's not as integrated as say a full microsoft suite, but probably one order cheaper.