It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.

And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.

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nradov 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.

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AnthonyMouse 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.

Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?

Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?

"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.

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ksclk 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?

	▲	schubidubiduba 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By enforcing antitrust laws, like it has been done many times in history?

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mlsu 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mostly the reason that these things are so capital intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.

That's politics.

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immibis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.

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Forgeties79 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.