
'Break up big tech's monopoly': Smaller rivals join growing chorus - techslave
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust/break-up-big-techs-monopoly-smaller-rivals-join-growing-chorus-ahead-of-congress-hearing-idUSKBN1ZG17J
======
cwxm
I definitely see the argument for why Big Tech's position in the US is
arguably too dominant.

If we look at the picture globally, Big Tech might be necessary for the
western world to prevent the proliferation of China's semi-state-backed tech
giants outside of China.

Could breaking up big tech in the United States mean ceding position to
China's tech giants?

~~~
screye
No, it would be enforcing the same requirements on chinese companies as the US
enforces on their own. If they don't then fine them just as much, to have
access to the US market.

It is not like cheap manufacturing, where the US has to cede ground to China
because they simply can't compete. Tech is where the US excels.

~~~
orcasauce
This is rapidly changing. On the international stage we're competing with
state backed monopolies that don't suffer the same burden of internal US anti-
competitive policy. It may damage access to the US market, but the expanding
global market is becoming more appetizing anyway. Consider China's Belt and
Roads initiative.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I would argue that monopolies have a detrimental effect on innovation, as they
kill disruptive new technologies in favor of their established services.
Having a strong anti-competitive policy may help us excel over China.

~~~
Nasrudith
Even given actual monopolies (I strongly disagree with the current claims) for
competition it is a push and pull thing whose specifics vary by situation.

Monopolies have better economies of scale as an intrinsic real advantage but
tend to be more hidebound and less innovative as they both don't need it in
the moment and from a fear or cannibalization. But not always for innovation -
they may also have the resources to devote to R&D that smaller players would
lack.

The mechanism of the monopoly also has significance for it determines what
needs to be done to maintain it. Although having a "better" source like
leveraging a prior runaway success is no guarantee that they won't turn to bad
ways to preserve it like regulatory capture with no other purpose served.

~~~
Apocryphon
Xerox PARC had a ton of innovation and world-class R&D, but consumers didn’t
benefit from any of it until smaller disruptive startups made good use of it.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Whereby the disruptive startups disrupted the very core of the innovations,
namely one integrated environment where every component was 'aware' of the
capabilities of others, and you could build and interconnect them in a visual
way.

Instead we have house of cards, layered up on top of each other, without
regard for the bloat, impedance mismatches, (intentional) incompabilities and
cognitive load that brings with it.

Nicely done...

------
m23khan
on one side I completely understand the need for healthy market competition in
tech industry. However, you have to realize the amount of innovation and
products FAANG companies (and Microsoft) have rolled out -- it is unimaginable
how we would be able to function equally efficiently both at personal and
commercial level.

On personal level for example, I use gmail/google search/rely on google to
tell me weather and search news and do FX rate conversion, do some unit
conversions, etc. I used to own android based phone and it made life simple to
have gmail compatible app and the likes.

Similarly, I can use amazon for shopping, trying out / learning AWS and even
get kindle to read ebooks should I desire. heck, amazon provides entire
infrastructure to efficiently deliver my parcels --- better than my
Government's mailing program.

\- Similarly majority of Business world runs mainly on backs of Microsoft
(when it comes to corporate tooling and computer OS).

\- Even take example of Apple -- their products are worldclass and its
integration with its own suite of products makes life so much simpler --
iPhone, iWatch, their storage offerings, etc.

Now imagine having to utilize products between dozens of companies instead of
these giants who you don't know would be able to survive in long run. And
those blaming these tech giants for lack of collaboration for a market
standard -- sure, that is correct but remember it was much worse to integrate
products and services among different vendors back in 1980s and 1990s when you
had dozens of medium and large companies.

~~~
sshumaker
That’s what people said about AT&T before we broke it up in 1982 - that it
would hurt innovation. This was the company that had Bell Labs after all.

Instead, we had an absolute revolution in communication technology since -
from fax lines, to modems, to cell connections, to the commercial internet.

It turns out that innovation happens more often when there is a lot of
competition in the market. And the market figures out how to build standards
for interop - you don’t need all of the products from the same company to get
them to work together.

~~~
antiterra
Your claim about innovation thriving when there is competition may be true,
but your examples run counter to that. Commercial fax machines, modems,
TCP/IP, Arpanet,and cell phones all predate the AT&T breakup.

------
jayd16
Has a break up ever worked historically? The US telecom industry is not a
great example of competition.

I'd much prefer laws preventing user lock in and lowing the burden of starting
a competitor to these companies.

~~~
s17n
You might be too young to remember, but phone calls used to cost money. So I
think you could say the break up was in fact a success.

~~~
jayd16
Landlines are still expensive. You can easily shop around with cell service
though, thanks to public management of the spectrum.

------
Despegar
This piece starts with Tile and Apple but that isn't going to go anywhere in
terms of antitrust. Tile's grievance is just the standard multi-decade
grievance of a startup that gets sherlocked by Apple and incorporated into the
OS. Unless they have patents that Apple is infringing, there's really no case
for them to make.

Google on the other hand is a straightforward antitrust case. I think
Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp could potentially also be
undone. Amazon seems to have been trying to expand the market definition to
all of retail or ecommerce, at least in their PR, but an antitrust case
against them would likely define the market more narrowly to particular
verticals (like book sales).

------
Nasrudith
Really I am sick of the endless hit pieces with definitions so bad that the
authors belong in the Hague from dinosaur companies who don't realize the
reason they fell isn't because of some bogeyman but because the problem can be
found in the mirror - they are the architects of their own downfall.

Translate the subtitle "Smaller rivals join growing chorus ahead of Congress
hearing" sensationalist hit piece into reality and you get captain fucking
obvious "Rivals: Please hamper our competitors - to grandstanders interested
in maintaining lobbyist money shakedown".

The Basecamp complaint is nonsensical even in the framework of nonsense of
Trademarks. If I announce that I am selling Yamaha Jetskis and have the actual
product (not a counterfeit) their job is to shut the hell up.

~~~
skrebbel
> definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague

As someone from nearby The Hague, um, what does this mean?

~~~
Nasrudith
It was an oblique reference to the trials for travesties and torture. Calling
offering and promoting store brands monopolistic abuse for instance.

Not an implication that the trials are illegitimate or anything like that.

------
uncle_j
This has to be done by the ground up by offering better alternatives rather
than trying to tear down these tech companies.

Also don't use their services. It is pretty easy to remove most of Google from
your life. I don't think Google search is even that much better than the
alternatives anymore (I am using Duck Duck Go and they are about the same
these days tbh).

~~~
paxys
Competition is not the answer to monopoly, since it the monopoly status which
is preventing competition in the first place. This is why antitrust laws
exist.

~~~
bagacrap
GP claims there is healthy competition, eg ddg. Therefore I guess by your
claim that monopoly blocks competition, there's no monopoly, unless you want
to claim DDG actually sucks, which would be an unpopular stance to stake here
on hn.

~~~
Apocryphon
The claim could perhaps be rephrased as stating there is no (substantial)
competition. For instance, Sailfish OS is technically a competitor to
iOS/Android, but it is by no means one with any considerable market share.

------
echelon
If the Democrats win the election this year, I think Google and Facebook both
stand serious chances of looking at antitrust cases.

Google is in the most dire situation. They own search, own the browser and
phone walled gardens that bring you there, own all the ads, knee-kick ad
blocking attempts, have started taking over content (AMP), have a surveillance
panopticon, control standards and neuter challenges to them (HTML5 is less
semantic than XHTML), have surveillance devices in the home, embrace-extend-
extinguish entire product spaces, kill products people rely on, don't offer
support ...

Google has its hands in too many pies, actively hurts other industries, and
they're creepy af.

Facebook might have less of a case against it, but they routinely flaunt
Democratic lawmakers, shape public opinion in bad ways, and buy out the
competition. Not a strong case, but I think it would be argued from a social
good perspective.

Apple and Microsoft seem safe. I have no idea about Amazon, since they have
competition in all their markets.

~~~
ravenstine
This is making the assumption that the Democratic party doesn't have a vested
interest in these Silicon Valley giants. Democrats running for office might be
slinging virtue, but I have my doubts that the party itself is particularly
interested in breaking up institutions that are politically aligned with them.
Having a Democrat president didn't stop the expansion of the surveillance
apparatus or the monopolization of tech and communication.

~~~
eckza
I don't want to sound too blackpill, but anymore I really feel like political-
party-based virtue claims - from both sides - are, by and large, expressions
of virtue theatre that are designed to garner support.

Some people in politics really do care; but at least in the US, it's hard not
to look at the state of things and come to the conclusion that the system
lends itself to corruption that goes so deep that nobody with any real
influence has a vested interest in "virtues" outside of using them to curry
favor with the general public.

Again, I apologize for how jaded this sounds... but it's really hard to feel
any other way.

~~~
riversflow
It doesn’t sound too blackpill to me at all, in fact I’d take it a step
further. I often wonder whether the domination of Google-Amazon-Facebook
doesn’t really serve the interests of the “Deep State” making them essentially
bulletproof. Why would you want to break apart a domestic company when they
serve as an international parasurveillance apparatus? You hear more from the
feds about Apple needing to backdoor their phones than the anti-competitive
behavior or spying that the rest take part in. Like you said, it’s probably
just lip service from (most) of the Democrats.

~~~
EdSharkey
The fact that your comment here hasn't been downvoted to oblivion suggests to
me the only beef most people have with what you've said is that you criticized
the Democrats. I find this really surprising given typical HN'er political
leanings.

Is this an indication of some sort of tipping point being reached? Have most
people regardless of politics come to the same conclusion about the reality of
the silicon valley surveillance-fueled power grab?

------
s17n
Basecamp is so full of shit here, they just don't want to have to pay for
traffic and it's nothing to do with monopoly (if there were three major search
engines, they'd all be selling the Basecamp keyword, because users don't
care).

~~~
josephd79
Imagine having to pay 70k plus a month so people searching for your company
name do not get redirected to a competitor using your company name to
advertise their business.

also lets be real there's really one 1 search engine.

~~~
s17n
Personally I don't have an ethical problem with search being pay to play.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure having competition in the search space wouldn't
solve the problem (because as I said, users don't care) - what basecamp really
wants here is regulation / a stronger interpretation of trademark law.

------
40acres
A key point for me in regarding big tech monopoly parts is that some of the
biggest companies, when viewed from a potential market cap perspective, are
possibly worth less than the sum of it's parts.

Facebook has a market-cap of ~630B. Individually you could easily see how an
independent Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would be worth more. AWS is
probably the most valuable company in the world but is tucked away with the
P&L of the various other parts of Amazon.

------
ilaksh
Breaking them up is great but you are going to end up back in a similar
situation if you can't build large platforms/marketplaces like those companies
provided.

I think the way to do that without having a conflict of interest is to
leverage decentralized technologies to create large public
platforms/marketplaces that companies can plug into.

------
6510
I had a different idea. In some areas law makers and tech companies would need
to write and follow so many vague rules it could be better to have a
government agency that does the work for them. It wouldn't be perfect but it
would create a different kind of problem that can be compared to the one we
are having right now.

Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement. Having
corporations design their own rules/laws on top of the legal system is costly
and undesirable. A proper legal formula would have punishments that scale with
the offense.

Having government manage authentication could rule out banning people across
all services without stating a reason.

Accidentally having some back ground music in a youtube video wouldn't have
cops rip your mailbox out of the ground or cancel your drivers license. It is
that absurd to have google do it.

Some processes need some type of private data, if the data is stored on
government servers access could be managed on a case by case basis. Likewise,
data transferred between google services would have to be routed though gov
servers where the request can be compared with the goals.

Google could provide a set of adverts to be shown next to email but gmail
wouldn't provide a source of information to display adds elsewhere.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
> Moderation for example could "simply" be part of law enforcement.

Not in countries with freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution.

~~~
6510
Oh LOL, I see now that what I said can be taken to mean the opposite of what I
had in mind.

I think we have good laws for what goes and doesn't go in public. Much more
relaxed than the big platforms terms of service. You already get arrested if
you publish the "right" kind of video. I'm simply suggesting we should strip
away whatever social engineering facebook and google have in mind.

The dumb account termination as a punishment for everything is like revoking
peoples citizenship by administrative punishment - in a one size fits all
approach.

Google's tos literally says they can terminate your account without stating a
reason. That is much more dystopian than the Chinese social credit system.

------
Ozzie_osman
Don't break them up. Just don't allow them to act monopolistically.

~~~
Mangalor
That's like asking bees not to sting. Corporations seek monopoly. It's just
what they do.

~~~
dang
You've been posting lots of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN.
Would you please stop?

The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it
thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
BurningFrog
If the headline at least said "monopolies"...

------
otras
> Google allows competitors to purchase ads on Basecamp’s trademark, and then
> _blocks consumers from reaching its site_ , Co-Founder David Heinemeier
> Hansson told Reuters in an interview.

Emphasis added. What does "blocks" means in this context?

~~~
nkingsy
Blocks means puts a page of ads first. If I don’t pay to “defend my brand”, my
competitors show up first in a search for my trademarked brand name. If I do
pay, my registered users will regularly ship money from me to google just by
being lazy.

~~~
manfredo
So by "blocking" they mean, "if I don't buy ands and my competitors do, then
people will see my competitors' brands before mine". Isn't this fundamental to
how advertisement works?

~~~
satyrnein
If someone searches for "project management software" and then is shown ads
from whoever bought ads for those terms, I think everyone would agree that
feels fair. If someone clicks your ad, you are happy to pay because this is a
fresh new lead delivered into your lap.

What rankles in the Basecamp example (not saying it rises to the level of
antitrust, though) is that the user is specifically searching for Basecamp.
Basecamp has already "earned" this lead though their other marketing spend, or
word of mouth, or whatever. However, if they don't pay Google, they risk
losing this lead to competitors sniping the "Basecamp" term. In a way, Google
is selling Basecamp's leads to competitors (contrary to what the user actually
wants!) using their "monopoly" in search.

~~~
pb7
The user wants the best product for their needs. If Basecamp only survives
because its users don’t know about alternatives, then it’s not a very good
business. This is _actual_ competition: building the best product and letting
the customers decide what they prefer. They already know about Basecamp in
this scenario so seeing ads for other products will only let them make a more
informed choice. The competitors, after all, are betting their advertising
budget on the opinion that their product is better. It’s not free.

------
bawana
Apple is the largest security holding in the portfolios of the members of
Congress. It is safe from antitrust.

------
alpineidyll3
Antitrust law in general needs to come out of it's slumber if the us wants to
be a dynamic economy. I recommend the book: the myth of capitalism to anyone
who wants to get more angry about this subject.

------
_tkzm
that's like saying that it is time for a dead patient to take his medicine.

------
buboard
I can't help but think that companies like basecamp or tile, largely brought
about this situation to themselves. Neither google nor apple should be
platforms to be dependent on. They should be used as startup platforms, get
some momentum and then actively seek to build their own outreach to customers
independently. Putting all your money in someone else's bag for years and
expecting them not to steal some , is borderline delusional. Rent seeking is a
spontaneous behavior of big platforms. HN orthodoxy will suggest otherwise,
but i think everyone who depends on corporate owned platforms should start
pulling away as soon as they have momentum. Citing the lack of alternatives is
a self-fulfilling prophecy: if nobody tries to find an alternative pathway ,
there just won't be one

~~~
johnward
Google has like 80% of the search market share. How does one not become
dependent on that traffic source?

~~~
closeparen
Before Google, the local newspaper had like 80% of advertising market share in
each city, and many were owned by national conglomerates.

~~~
marcosdumay
I highly doubt that.

But anyway, I don't see how that's relevant.

~~~
closeparen
Because Google has not changed the structure of the market, only which player
sits in that position.

~~~
robbrown451
But when you advertised in a newspaper, you didn't have to fear the newspaper
suddenly becoming your competitor and then refusing to run your ads.

Well, I suppose that might've happened if you were another publication or
something. But it was relatively rare. Also, newspapers weren't the only way
people advertised, for instance the yellow pages was a big deal when I was a
kid. (and it was the subject of a Ralph Nader article calling it out as a
monopoly:
[https://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2004/08/fo...](https://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2004/08/fort_dix_vetera.html)
)

~~~
bagacrap
Google refused to run someone's ads? When I search for "cloud hosting" the
first two things I see are ads for IBM and Lenovo. The third hit is an ad for
Google.

~~~
robbrown451
Right but what about having a product in an app store and then next thing you
know Apple or Google has their own product that competes with it.

------
deevolution
We're essentially living under techno-feudalist system. I don't see breaking
up Big Tech's monopoly as fixing this. There needs to be a fundamental shift
away from centralized platforms to decentralized p2p platforms. That's the
only real way to rebel against the current system of exploitation.

~~~
snarf21
I disagree. We have no decentralized platforms that work at scale. I think
breaking up the big companies and unwinding the mergers of the last 5 years
would be a huge help. Everything from IG and WhatsApp to Whole Foods to the
Comcast, Disney, ATT, Verizon acquisitions should all go back out.

The other way to make exploitation harder is to pass some regulations that you
aren't allowed to collect data on people and sell it without explicit
permission. You must opt-in and you can't be penalized for saying no. People
complain about Facebook and Google spying on you and forget that the carriers
know where every single person is 24/7\. They know (mostly) every website that
every single person visits and at what times via DNS lookups. This data is
scary and they shouldn't be able to collect it let alone sell it.

