
Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness' - arctux
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/opinion/sunday/fascism-economy-monopoly.html
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cardamomo
The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To
think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but
isn't enforcing them angers me.

~~~
stickfigure
What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it
up? Which half of your social network goes to which part?

This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not
constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those
details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or
useful as you seem to think.

~~~
bobthepanda
We need to blow the gates open and mandate that

1) a person has the right to export their data and receive it in a usable
format 2) a person has the right to use this exported data and give it to a
competitor

There is no reason why switching between, say, Spotify, Google Play Music,
Apple Music, and Amazon Music should be any harder than switching a cell phone
carrier. Imagine how much faster Myspace or Digg would've imploded if you
could just export to a competitor with a click of a button.

~~~
tensor
You can switch today by just cancelling one service and signing up for
another. If, however, you are suggesting that somehow your internal "profile"
of likes can be easily moved, then you should first learn a little bit about
how these services work.

Each uses internal IP, unique to them, that won't work with a competitors
technology even if they could get access to it. And of course that ignores all
the issues of trade secrets and patents that your suggestion would bring up.

You can switch cell phone carriers because of a few very simple standards. But
when you do you are not taking the majority of data about you. You are only
taking your number.

I also challenge that all of this data is "your data." Let's take hacker news
as an example. What is "your data"? Your username, passwords, comments, those
all seem pretty clear. But what about your upvotes and reports? Is that your
data? An upvote involves you, but also someone else's comment or story, so
it's hard to argue that it's yours alone to do with as you please. Also, what
about website log data? Is that your data? Logs about web requests that you
make are definitely trigger by an action of yours, but the log message itself
is produced by ycombinator software, so why should you get to "own" it?

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olivermarks
Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950,
he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often
precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over
globalization and giant platform companies.

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srtjstjsj
"populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people
care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what
people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"

~~~
nabla9
Populism does not mean popular.

It's unfortunate that populism has a name that leads to this misconception.
People see the word and jump into discussion assuming that they know what is
all about.

Populism is the claim that the people have a 'will'. There is no real
disagreement of what the real people want or need for compromise. There are
people who disagree but they are not the 'real people'. They are somehow
compromised, the corrupt elite, misled or 'the others'. What 'people want' is
already known, now you just need to vote populist into power to implement the
will of the people. Laws and norms often make it difficult to implement this
'will' and they should be changed.

By contrast liberal[1] democracies are based on idea that the complex
democratic process gradually produces something that people can live with.
It's not exactly what anyone wants. There is no common agreement of what
people want when people go and vote. The end result of working democracy is
negotiated compromise. Laws and norms should be followed when this game of
democracy is played.

\---

[1]: liberal is another word that have different meanings in different
contexts. Liberal does not mean leftist in this context.

~~~
telchar
That's all fine and good if the democracy actually works. If it has been
subverted by a corrupt elite then a desire for a real functioning liberal
democracy by a vast majority of the populace can be handily written off as
populism using that same definition. It's quite a convenient to define the
term in a way that makes it vaguely pejorative, in that case. The fact that
you set it up as a contrast to liberal democracy is a good illustration of
that. Populism, like elitism, can be right or wrong for a given situation
depending on context and policy details.

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ilaksh
I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But
we seem not to be.

If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that
technology actually can help with these types of societal problems.

For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have
some benefits over more traditional political structures.

Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like
cryptocurrency.

In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies
could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like
Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could
gain wider deployment).

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masonic
I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but
the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past
competitors:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers)

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harigov
I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter
how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese
corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies
isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).

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shmerl
It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets
through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non
existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market
deregulation".

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imgabe
I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things.

Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually
providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional
manipulation?

~~~
fromMars
Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is
bad, Google is evil, etc.

Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on
them.

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seibelj
I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”,
and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business
certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train
system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a
totalitarian dictator he was able to control.

Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is
fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.

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trevyn
Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I
will go read Reuters instead. :)

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yuhong
I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a
reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses
increases every time the revenue increases.

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mtlevine0
Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?

~~~
yuhong
I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought
DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.

~~~
antidesitter
> Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.

as opposed to...?

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zaru27
It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany
went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons.

As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle
are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society.
Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political
cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of
control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.

