This is one of the thought fallacies that lock in the status quo - "if you can't fix all problems everywhere all at once, then you shouldn't do anything at all"
Noticing the market effects of taking out one major player while ignoring the others doing similar things isn’t a fallacy.
It’s noticing that as long as you stay somewhat low profile you can get away with almost anything, as apparently they can only notice/do something about one big player at a time.
Doing one thing today and portraying that as never doing anything else is a fallacy. Acting like it would do no good and have no effect on everyone else even if they never do the exact same thing to everyone else is a fallacy. It's fallacies all around.
It’s a fallacy because it’s based on some kind of idealism and not reality. Let’s see how it works for other aspects of life:
“Unless cops ticket every single speeder, they should not ticket anyone”
“Unless doctors can cure a patient’s cancer, they should not set a broken bone”
“Unless you’re going to track down everyone you’ve ever wronged, you should never apologize.”
I don’t think those work. The reality is that doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. And in a complex business and legal environment, insisting on simultaneous and equal action really is suggesting we do nothing.
Regulators should go after companies that break laws. Someone looking at company X should never, ever decide to forego enforcement because they people looking at company Y are not taking action.
Yes. An antitrust suit against Google is itself welcome. But if it stops here, or Alphabet mysteriously gets away very lightly after appointing a few more "ex"-intelligence people to its board, we should see through it.
As other replies noted, no one is looking for or setting the bar at simultaneous and equal action.
Nearly any action in proportion to the harm would be sufficient.
It’s a common principle in law, actually.
For instance, with speeders - if literally no one including folks going 20 over the speed limit get a ticket for years in a town, and then the Sheriff’s political opponent gets a huge ticket and his car impounded for going 5 over, would that be ok?
What about if the Dr. treated everyone, except for his childhood bully which was dying of cancer?
Monopolistic and anti-trade behavior is going nuts everywhere, in almost every industry. From meat packing to shipping to tech.
If there is an antitrust finding and a real, and impactful outcome, they’ll at a minimum be distracted with 5+ years of reorganization BS and lose their ability to leverage what they have now.
There’s a fallacy in your reasoning, too: The assumption that any government action is a pure “fix” with no downsides at all.
In reality, government actions in situations like this are more about tradeoffs. There will be winners and losers and, despite what some people want to believe, consumers will not unilaterally benefit from these actions. There will be downsides along with the upsides.
Applying heavy handed regulation to some companies while letting others do the same thing creates its own set of problems. Once the government becomes the arbiter of who wins and who loses, it gets ugly and the incentives get very weird.
The other fallacy is that spot enforcement is the only option. When you have multiple companies competing in the same space doing similar things, singling one out as a “monopoly” and targeting them is illogical. You create industry regulation and apply it to everyone. If nothing else, it’s a matter of efficiency.
I'm not saying they all need to be addressed at once. But they should be addressed close together otherwise it's just the government picking market winners. Technology moves fast.
If you force Google to reorg and then it takes 5 years to bring more antitrust action I'm not sure you've actually improved anything.
I agree, but it could be that they need to focus all their resources to take on google with any chance of success. It could also very well be that the other big companies alter their behavior in response to the now real threat of anti-trust enforcement.
"I agree, but it could be that they need to focus all their resources to take on google with any chance of success."
Why?
What does this even mean?
I have no idea what it means to "focus all their resources" or why it's important.
The antitrust division of the DOJ alone has 380 attorneys (900 people total), and that is before you get into the fact that they also will contract with outside firms, etc.
This is 10x the size of the average large law firm's entire antitrust practice area. Probably 20x a lot of the time.
They can easily run multiple large tech cases at once.
FTC is 2x as large (it has 750 attorneys total)
"It could also very well be that the other big companies alter their behavior in response to the now real threat of anti-trust enforcement."
This didn't happen at all when MS was taken out.
Or AT&T
Or ...
Are you suggesting all these staff are just sitting idly and doing nothing? Or could it be they have these large staffs because there is a whole lot of lawyering to do on a day to day basis keeping these agencies running for a country with 300+ million people.
Your claim was that they need to "focus their resources" and can't possibly handle multiple large tech cases at once. You still haven't explained what that means, at all.
I pointed out they have tons of resources, even comparing it to the practices of large law firms that handle many large cases at once.
Now you are arguing they are doing something, but apparently not handling multiple large tech cases since you think they are incapable of doing that, but that there is some weird "day to day" that involves a significant mass of attorneys that they are all doing instead that is somehow "keeping the agencies running", and cite the size of the population of the US as if that has literally any relevance to anything.
This is all totally odd, since it's the 520 other people that keep the DOJ ATR running, not the lawyers. That's literally their job. The FTC also has a large support staff aside from the 780 attorneys.
What i take away from all of this is:
1. You have no idea what they do or how they operate.
2. You don't want to admit that they in fact, have plenty of resources to operate multiple tech cases at once, and are repeatedly deflecting because you have no basis to assert otherwise.
To wit - here's a fun fact that, uh, slightly damages your argument, FWIW - they've made multiple public comments and statements (to congress even!) that they believe they have what they need to handle multiple simultaneous large tech cases. It's in fact, why they staffed up over the past few years, adding hundreds of attorneys. So they don't even think you are right. Only you do.
You would know this, of course, if you actually bothered to try to look at or understand any of the data/statements/etc around the FTC or DOJ, rather than just randomly asserting things.
You would also know that the DOJ/FTC break down what percent of their support is focused on what (including sustaining operations), for example, and since it's not a very large percent, you wouldn't try to make a silly argument that they are understaffed to handle it because of that.
3. You aren't willing to engage in a discussion where you back up any point you make with any data.
Given #3, this is pointless. It's not worth trying to discuss this with someone who just asserts things based on their random opinions, and just changes their argument when they realize someone is pushing back on their silliness and giving real data.
If you want to have a meaningful discussion, bring facts. Otherwise, it's just people asserting their own personal gut feelings on the internet, which is not particularly interesting to discuss.
It's still right to worry that other obscene monopolists are merely using the government as a cat's paw against a rival - or maybe the government itself is using the lawsuit as a threat to whip Google into compliance with some national security demand that won't be made public.
These are concerns you would have if it was in China, Russia or even the EU it happened. Rightly so. You should worry about it for the US too.
Can we? I hope so. But first step is watching out for it. We can't solve it if we don't notice it, and there's historically been a lot of blatant things we didn't notice.
Google is probably the primary counterweight against Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Amazon. Taking out or diminishing Google will strengthen the monopolies of the other 4.
Maybe because the regulatory offices aren't built well enough to handle all monopolies at once? These companies have a huge amount of lobbying activity and the best legal teams out there. I don't think taking down one monopoly would strengthen others, it'd set Google as an example and other monopolies that don't shrink themselves will get taken down next.
"Maybe because the regulatory offices aren't built well enough to handle all monopolies at once? "
Based on what data is this asserted?
As I pointed out elsewhere, the FTC has 780 attorneys, which is about 20x the largest antitrust lawfirms you will find.
The DOJ antitrust division has 380 attorneys, which is about 10x.
Both have hundreds of support folks as well (the DOJ ATR has 900 employees total).
It's not just them either, they have states with them as well that each carry their own resourcing.
They are also happy to hire outside resources.
There seems to be a weird view here of how any of this works, which amounts to what you said in your next sentence - "These companies have a huge amount of lobbying activity and the best legal teams out there."
Even if this is true, which it's often simply not (for example, the DOJ hired Boies to deal with Microsoft, at a time when Boies was unknown, and they overall had a much better legal team than MS, at a time when antitrust regulation of companies was neither new nor surprising), it doesn't change how many resources you need to deal with multiple companies at once.
I met plenty of DOJ antitrust attorneys in my time in DC. They are the best out there. What basis do you have for asserting they are not?
I ask because I've yet to see a single person in this conversation who has a view based on things other than "gut feelings". Hopefully you do!
Because if it's just more of the same dataless trope spouted elsewhere, then it's not just a silly stereotype, it's also horribly denigrating to those folks, who really are, as i said, the best you will find.
It may change political wherewithal, but it has no bearing on the ability of regulatory offices to charge and prosecute multiple cases at once. Contrary to your claim, they are in fact, built to handle this.
Like anything else, trying a case like this has a relatively fixed, and well known cost.
The ATR and friends are well funded to be capable of trying multiple big tech cases at once, and in fact, are.
" I don't think taking down one monopoly would strengthen others, it'd set Google as an example and other monopolies that don't shrink themselves will get taken down next."
Given the exact opposite has happened in every single case historically (AT&T, MS, et al), this seems very wrong.
Overall, HN seems to focus on tropes about antitrust law, with very little data or knowledge of how any of it works for real.
People seem very happy to offer strong opinions despite that lack of data, however!
Sometimes that isn't a fallacy. If you have a cancerous tumors, you generally want to get rid of every bit of it at the same time - removing 50% isn't going to slow it down.
