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| ▲ | hilariously 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is actually how anti-trust works - if you decide a company gets too big you Ma Bell it and break it up, its very actionable, just hard. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | People keep bringing up Bell as if the situation now is not just as bad. | | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And they want to do it again and enforce anti trust laws? I don't see any contradiction here. Break up faang and keep a close eye on all these acquisitions the ai companies are doing and why they need to own package management and code editors and etc. | | |
| ▲ | hilariously 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, breaking up things wasn't bad, it was the completely lax failure to continue this action and to regulate corporations that got us rafts of stupid ass legislation culminating in citizens united. "Too big to fail" companies are just government entities that are not regulated properly. |
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| ▲ | MSFT_Edging 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The situation now is just as bad, if not worse, which is why people keep bringing up the case of something being done about the monopolies. |
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| ▲ | 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | esseph 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago? No, because if we had proper anti-trust they already would have both been broken up years ago. |
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| ▲ | CPLX 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's nothing ambiguous about it at all. We had it as our public policy for generations and then bought-off politicians stopped enforcing it. The information is captured the same way as most policy - via statute and precedent, and guidelines for enforcement agencies. None of this is confusing, or even hard, except insofar as it's hard to fight against well funded opponents. |
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| ▲ | miltonlost 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How is going back to a policy that used to work "vague and unactionable"? It literally had been actionable. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else? | | |
| ▲ | palmotea 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else? That's pretty unfair. IIRC, Standard Oil was on of the companies that was the impetus for antitrust law (and broken up by it), and AT&T was broken up (famously) in the 80s. Basically, your "argument" is a troll or a deep and basic misunderstanding. Especially in the case of Standard Oil. You're basically saying the law doesn't work because it didn't work before it existed (Standard Oil became dominant in the 1870s or 1880s and the Sherman Antitrust act wasn't passed until 1890). | |
| ▲ | miltonlost 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They were LITERALLY BROKEN UP due to anti-trust policies. You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye. How are you allowed to continue to post every 2 seconds? dang | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers. The policy in question (as stated) should have prevented Ma Bell and Standard Oil from getting to the point of being broken up. | | |
| ▲ | asolove 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 1. If you are proposing something even stricter than previous antitrust rules, great. But getting back to antitrust itself is actionable is step 1. 2. You don’t have to prevent every case before it happens so much as just stochastically go after the worst ones to make it less economical for people to go take on debt to have huge swaths of consolidation. Letting the market work, after pricing in that egregious monopolies will be broken up, is kinda great and better than minutely scrutinizing every tiny deal for long-term consequences. | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you want to move the goalpost of the conversation that's fine, but it's different from what the previous person was talking about, and why it doesn't make sense to blow up at them for it. > You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye. is a wildly disproportionate response to the post, IMHO. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | eesmith 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Microsoft and Amazon should have been restricted, due to their monopoly power, long before 5 years ago. I've read enough of the pre-Borkian (ie, pre-1980s) history of antitrust law to know this was very actionable. They were not easily circumvented in that it required decades of funding and activism to nerf the Sherman Antitrust Act and its successors. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago? Antitrust enforcement can be done retroactively as well, if it appears that a large company abuses its financial firepower to undercut competitors or a marketshare gets too dominant. |
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| ▲ | DoneWithAllThat 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | It really was not. Go look at the success rate of enforcement. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're alluding to some second order effects which are real but also able to be dealt with, and have been. Montgomery Ward thought it was "too big to fail" and too powerful to regulate. So, what happened? If the US government wants to, and it has in the past, it just takes your business at gunpoint. 4 soldiers walked into the ultra-conservative owners office and made him leave. Two of them picked up his arms and legs, took him outside, and deposited him on the sidewalk. > a major U.S. CEO being physically evicted from his own company by armed troops became one of the most famous news photos of the home-front war |
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