| I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again. There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through. Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises. |
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| ▲ | GeekyBear 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. I read a good Google adjacent example of this in yesterday's NYTimes: > Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk.
Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax...
Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. https://archive.ph/LTkix | |
| ▲ | Aerroon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. There are very real concerns when you break up a company though. Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. That could easily make a politician that's "politician out to get the big companies" into "politician making billionaires richer." | | |
| ▲ | vintermann a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. Most owners (weighted by share) do NOT seem to want their big monopolies broken up, despite the track record of Standard Oil. | |
| ▲ | tombert 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tough to say for sure, but I think it's probably still better to have more billionaires if there's more competition. I wasn't around during the breakup, but my parents told me that phone service got considerably better and cheaper after the AT&T breakup, which makes enough sense to me: if a consumer can drop you for someone else, you have a reason to try and compete on service and/or price. |
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| ▲ | tombert 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!). For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies. People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated. I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG. This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers). We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet. We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity. 1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around). Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion. | | |
| ▲ | tombert a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Do we need more than 1% conversion though? As long as the company is sustainable then that's sufficient to justify the company's existence. I think it says more about a lot of these services in that they're so shitty that they people will only use them if they're "free"; if Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok aren't good enough services to justify people paying for it, then maybe they shouldn't exist? You can't use Kagi or Nebula without paying, so I don't really see how they're suffering from the free riders you keep insisting are some horrible epidemic. Almost by definition, if you're using Kagi or Nebula, you're already a conversion...are you saying a 1% conversion from advertising? I have a collection of four hundred blu-rays and thousands of CDs. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime, I pay for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, and I don't use an ad blocker. I don't know if that falls into your criteria of "someone who can discuss this honestly", and of course I don't really have a means of "proving" this to you, but if you can assume I'm being truthful I don't think I'm speaking out of my ass here. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash a day ago | parent [-] | | Then accept the equilibrium of Google being the god of the internet. If people refuse to pay, refuse to view ads, and are happy to let the suckers like you (and me) carry the cost, then no one should be complaining about the impenetrable giants who reign over us. The internet can reap what it sowed. I'm burning 3GB a month loading ads on my phone so others can view ad free? Maybe I should petition the IRS to let me write it off as a charitable donation. The story of Vid.me is excellent here, because they were actually on track to dethrone youtube. The hype was real and they genuinely were getting positive traction. Did youtube fight back? Did google sound the alarm? Was there any effort to keep creators on yt? No, no, and no. Why? Because Google knew Vid.me would run out of runway, and that at heart, the users were just there for the free lunch. Vid.me went bankrupt and never made even a dollar from their "fans". | | |
| ▲ | tombert a day ago | parent [-] | | But there are companies that charge money and manage to be successful, as I stated. Even before the internet most businesses failed. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for dumb reasons. Before people expected everything to be free. Pointing to a company that you liked failing doesn't really prove anything; there's always a billion variables that can contribute to corporate failures and saying "LOL PEOPLE WON'T PAY FOR THINGS AD BLOCK BAD I HAVE TO PAY BANDWIDTH" doesn't really say anything. Just because you can find some companies that charged money and failed doesn't change my point at all. Netflix has become successful enough to be in the running to buy Warner Bros. Netflix is an internet-first company that doesn't do anything for free and yet it's getting to a point where it's able to buy a very large legacy media company. It has been competing with free YouTube content and ThePirateBay. I don't see at all how this proves that I need to "accept the equilibrium of Google". |
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| ▲ | balamatom a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | >it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out It's generally not possible to have an honest conversation about something when one side sees the other's honest response as "going absolutely insane" :-) |
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| ▲ | vintermann a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, Google had significant power over "who gets to buy and at what price" long before ad blocking caught on. Don't blame ad blockers for sabotaging your plan to get rich. |
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