The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices in the first place, so while they may appear to be a 'benevolent dictator,' they will quickly turn for the worse.
> The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices
Is that true? That doesn't match the definition of any antitrust regulation I'm aware of. AFAIK antitrust regulation is intended to enforce _fairness_, not _innovation_. Often the two go hand in hand, of course, but I think it's worth not conflating the two.
The idea of anti-trust regulation is to break up companies that cornered a market, that is, (mostly) prevented competition on it. Breaking them up serves to make more, smaller companies (out of the split giant) that would start to compete again.
Anti-trust laws can be seen as pro-market laws that try to prevent long periods of monopolized markets without waiting for a naturally occurring disruption, instead providing a mandated disruption.
Whether it's _efficient_, and whether it works as intended, can be discussed.
I used "fairness" because it appears in most definitions of the anti trust regulation. A "level playing field" is 100% not the point of antitrust laws. Sidenote: I don't believe any "playing field" in business is "level".
I think something for folks to keep in mind is that much of the US antitrust laws were made back in the early 1900s to combat _literal_ monopolies, objective collusion between companies to harm consumers, and so on. We're talking price fixing here.
> Anti-trust laws can be seen as pro-market laws that try to prevent long periods of monopolized markets without waiting for a naturally occurring disruption, instead providing a mandated disruption.
This sentence is dangerous: it is very close to saying that any long-term, successful company should be "disrupted". Interpreted differently it could be read that startups should have some inherent right to evenly compete with large companies (by fining or splitting up large companies to be "beatable" by startups).
Again, that is not all the point of anti trust laws. I won't argue whether there should be laws like that (as you can tell, I think not), but the anti trust regulation in the USA is definitely squarely aimed at _actual_ monopolies and collusion.
> This sentence is dangerous: it is very close to saying that any long-term, successful company should be "disrupted". Interpreted differently it could be read that startups should have some inherent right to evenly compete with large companies (by fining or splitting up large companies to be "beatable" by startups).
No it isn't. "Successful company" and "company that has cornered/monopolized their market" are not even close to the same thing.
Anti-trust laws don't aim to make competition fair, they aim to make it possible.
Bell Labs was a monopoly (at least for a time period) and yielded countless high-impact, transformative innovations that a company with fewer resources (probably) would not have been able to develop. I think (although I could be wrong) most would agree they were a net benefit to society.
Bell Labs was not a monopoly: it did not prevent operation of other research labs. E.g. the highly successful Xeroc PARC co-existed with them for a decade or two.
Bell the telecom company was a monopoly that financed Bell Labs. Bell Labs did not go down in flames when Bell was partitioned in 1982, and continued providing the world with great achievements.
Totally true; I glossed over the distinction between Bell and Bell Labs -- I suppose this might be analogous (with the full understanding that the analogy is incomplete) to separating Google[x] and Google. However, is it not the case that Bell Labs was able to undertake such ambitious research projects because it was backed by a monopoly?
Also, while Xerox PARC was also a legendary research institution in its day, I don't put it at the scale of Bell Labs, which touched a much broader array of fields. To quantify this distinction, compare the research budgets in 2018 dollars:
In our local post-monopoly phone provider, 30 years ago dispatchers would call the local strip club bartender to reach their technicians. They were all on a first name basis.
It was much better to work for these companies back then. Now, everything is super efficient and all that extra value the technicians generate go straight to executives and shareholders.
I don't think it can be considered an open question if we're all just waiting for the inevitable disaster.
The problem is we're just being slowly boiled so nothing has been done to stop the complete perversion of democracy and slide into a corporate oligarchy.
Innovative companies on their own are not really innovative really. A monopoly enforces their opinion and product in the world. If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game (it is a monopoly right).
As has been mentioned a bunch of times here, Google and Facebook have all too naturally embraced Microsoft's (and prior monopolies' ) approach of embrace, extend, and extinguish. There were at least 2-3 articles this week about the games Google plays (e.g. youtube loading faster on Chrome due to Google going ahead with their own suggested implementation without consensus).
I don't think there is any economic model out there that even argues monopolies are a good idea in some fashion.
> Youtube loading faster on Chrome due to Google going ahead with their own suggested implementation without consensus
Are they blocking other browsers from utilizing said efficient tool because claiming that they are purposefully slowing other browsers is disingenuous as they are almost certainly just optimizing efficiency between their various products (chrome and youtube).
Blaming google for optimizing their systems without supporting every other possible system under the sun is beyond ridicules. Nobody has the engineering capacity to perfectly optimize their services for every use case.
> If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game
yes, basically true, i think. the article says Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation...
why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful? what does Google get in return? how does Google explain to shareholders that this is not a waste?
> why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful?
It's not useful, it's required. You have two choices. You can do the equivalent of what Microsoft did for a long time, and hide in the Pacific Northwest and pray that the Monster in DC just leaves you alone, while all of your competitors lobby to have you destroyed. You will not be left alone no matter what, if you achieve that kind of success, no matter how you achieve it. The only rational choice, is to get in the game and try to influence the outcome, which is what all of your competitors are going to be doing. Microsoft learned that very painful lesson after waiving at the US Government for years and thinking they could ignore what was going on with their competitors lobbying. Google learned from Microsoft's mistake, and got in almost immediately once their position became dominant.
With the politics in DC, you're either in it defending your position, or you're dinner being served up by your competitors who are very aggressively in it and trying to use the political machine against you as a weapon. The US has a $7 trillion government system top to bottom, one third the size of the economy. There's no avoiding that.
Unfortunately, I agree that lobbying has become another "tax" to be paid, consequently a "tax" to the consumers. Tangent: I still don't understand how people find lobbying natural and a good idea.
Is preemptive regulation ever a good thing? How could any government have pre-regulated, say, the internet?
If you are not for technological progress, is the corollary true, that you are for technological stagnation? Is not tech stagnation also tech attrition?
Edit: am I really being downvoted for asking for evidence that technological progress (the driving force that made all people on Earth extraordinaly more rich) is bad? What is wrong with you, people?
Well, I disagree. Partial knowledge and technology can be bad and extremely dangerous.
In the 19th- early 20th century they were treating radioactive substances like they were chew toys (making toys etc). The worst nuclear accident happened near lake Karachay, because they had the technology to create nuclear weapons, but did not understand, or knew the danger and how to manage the waste. (Russians were trying to catch up and create their own arsenal, had acquired fragmented knowledge that were piecing together.)
No. My argument is kind of the opposite. I am here countering the point that gaining knowledge is a monotonous function with respect to "goodness"/value. We need to be cautious and acknowledge our lack of knowledge, when we move ahead.
I fully agree with you, of course. That doesn't mean the technology is bad, though - it's just that people are too cocky and think they know everything. Knowledge can't be bad nor good, people and their use of knowledge are.
You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used.
Besides I could just as easily say some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad. If you want to say that "knowledge is definitely not bad" then I'm going to ask you your own question - can you support that statement?
> You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used.
False. Every day, dozens of thousands of people in academia engage in basic research (actual term), something that does not lead to "usable technology" most of the time.
> some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad
Are you saying that guns kill people? I thought that people kill people, using guns.
So our knowledge about guns is bad because guns kill? I can't explain it more, sorry. I think the explanation I've given is very obvious - technology can be used badly, but it's always the people who do it, not the technology itself. Technology is neutral, you can simply not use it - knowing it still might prove important for development of other technologies, e.g. for prevention, reparation, ... after the original technology is used, in case of nuclear weapons for example (how would we know how to prevent and treat radiation illness without knowing anything about nuclear physics), and at the very extreme, the technology itself will do nothing - until people start using it. People are bad, not technology.
That's kind of a poor reply. "Sometimes things have unintended consequences". And a link to a book that says that technology alone won't save the environment, more things will be needed.
