Breaking Up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook Could Save Capitalism, NYU Professor Says (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: If you want to get an idea of how quickly sentiment has shifted against U.S. tech giants, just listen to NYU professor Scott Galloway. [...] "After spending the majority of the last two years of my life really trying to understand them and the relationship of the ecosystem, I've become 100 percent convinced that it's time to break these companies up." It's an audacious claim from anyone, even more startling coming from someone who has been such a close and bullish observer of these tech giants. Yet for Galloway, it is clear that the four companies have simply become too big, and too powerful. "The premise of my book is that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are our new gods, our new source of love, our consumptive gods," he said. "And as a result of their ability to tap into these very basic instincts, they've aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation's GDP ... I think these entities are more powerful than any entity, with maybe the exception of China and the U.S."

[...] Galloway said he wasn't making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants' numerous sins. "There are reasons to be angry at them," he said. "They basically power fake news ... So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we're finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed."

Comments

Why is this here?

[xvan]

Breaking up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook could save capitalism

Says Scott Galloway, NYU marketing profressor

Re:Why is this here?

[MitchDev]

Don't forget to break up ALL the Banks, Wall Street corporations, Walmart, Comcast, Time Warner, DISNEY, the much consolidated airlines, etc etc etc while you are at it.

Re:Why is this here?

[HornWumpus]

msmash should post at -1. Story is obvious troll.

Re:Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agendas.

Re:Why is this here?

[macsimcon]

Banks are a systemic threat to the economy. The top four (or is it five?) banks are now so large that the failure of any one of them could destroy the country.

But there is another way: every state could charter its own bank, just like North Dakota has. With that much competition, fees would fall, the big banks would lose marketshare, and shrink to a size which didn't threaten the country with their failure.

Re:Why is this here?

[ph1ll]

Yes, indeed, he is a professor of marketing and this is great marketing for his career! (Expect a forthcoming book by Fall).

Meanwhile, the rest of the world will leave such matters to the professors of law where they belong.

Re:Why is this here?

[budsetr]

Yes, this. But don't stop there. All large companies. Then legislate how large companies can get. And do not allow companies to own other companies. BTW, fuck Ajit Pai

Re:Why is this here?

[atrex]

Yeah, if they're going to break up some big companies they need to break up ALL big companies. Otherwise they're just picking apart the newer tech giants so that the older companies can swoop in and take over.

And don't forget AT&T and Verizon.

Re:Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add Microsoft in addition to all those other big companies that people are mentioning.

Re:Why is this here?

[fluffernutter]

Yes because otherwise marketing specialists are struggling out there, I'm sure.

Re:Why is this here?

[AlwinBarni]

Is there a score more then 5 on /.? If so, the post above deserves more.

Bashing tech-giant wagon is rolling out, it is never a problem with echo-system created by politicians, it is always someone in the spotlight at fault.

Re:Why is this here?

[ph0rk]

I'd think you'd want an economist if you were interested in what might happen with the economy after an anti-trust intervention, not a lawyer.

Re: Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't make sense.
If 1 quarter fails there are still 3 quarters left.

Too big to fail because it will hurt the country is a lie.

Re:Why is this here?

[Rob Y.]

It's interesting that Microsoft isn't mentioned in your list. Have they become that irrelevant? Or have they just managed to slip just far enough below the radar to continue their monopolistic practices in areas nobody's looking at any more?

Re:Why is this here?

[foxjazz4003]

crypto is already making banks obsolete.

Re:Why is this here?

[Shogun37]

Wait...Msmash is an EDITOR!? I do not think that word means what you think it means. I'd rather say (he/she/it/whatever) is a confused marketing activist. Or an activist marketer. What were we talking about?

Re: Why is this here?

[edtice1559]

In case this question is serious, the issue is not that there won't be banks left, its that large banks have many counter-parties. And it's not transparent who those counter-parties are and what would happen to them should the bank fail. Depositors of course get paid back via the FDIC (at a cost to taxpayers). But other counter-parties may end up bankrupt as well. During the period of unwinding, it will be impossible to know which entities in the country are solvent and which ones are not. This tends to throw markets into a tizzy. And while this is happening, certain things can't get done. Like for example, the issuing of municipal debt (is the insurer solvent nobody knows). Because the US economy relies so heavily on debt ( a separate but somewhat related problem ), the economic impact would be quite significant.

Re:Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

If people really cared they could go to a credit union and leave the bank scams behind them.

Re:Why is this here?

[Bobrick]

We were talking about the subject of the story until the inevitable editor bashing kicked in, at least it's not insignificant typo correction. Yet. The problem with Slashdot isn't its editors, it's the astonishing number of shit comments.

Re:Why is this here?

[MitchDev]

Just forgot about them, they are evil but they have kinda slipped in "name recognition". Plus, I take it you missed the sarcasm

Re:Why is this here?

[HornWumpus]

The idiotic 'subject of the story'.

Re: Why is this here?

[macsimcon]

I'm not sure that's true any more. Under Dodd Frank, can't insolvent banks seize depositors' funds, effectively turning them into unsecured creditors, in order to stay solvent? See http://www.publicbankinginstit...

It might be safer to keep some of your money in a credit union rather than a big bank.

Re:Why is this here?

[mileshigh]

The big diffrence is that MS isn't heavy into the media business.

Technology may generate pots of money, but influencing the minds behind the eyeballs gives you POWER.

Re:Why is this here?

[networkBoy]

I've *always* been with a CU. I seriously don't understand what possible perks a bank gives that make it compelling for an individual person.

Re: Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

So much we don't know and we are not sure it just show that the whole system is a gargantuan fuck-up and the only way to fix it is to actually kill the beast not try to fixit it, trying to fix it will achieve nothing but feed and grow the beast further.

Re: Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

When something is too big accordingly to natural law it must fail.

Re:Why is this here?

[MooseOnTheLoose]

These companies are not nearly as big a threat as the companies with actual monopolies or duopolies where there are no viable competitive options for most of their customers. In my opinion, if we are going to break up any company, we should start with Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, and then work our way down the list to all the other cable/broadband/phone companies that have defacto monopolies. You know, the ones that basically bought out the FCC and got Net Neutrality repealed. In my opinion these are the companies that are most dangerous to the American way of life. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook got so big by giving people what they want, whereas the cable industry got so big by mostly giving people what the cable industry wanted to offer, which had very little to do with what their customers wanted. This professor is concentrating on the whales but totally ignoring the sharks.

Re:Why is this here?

[demonlapin]

"How large companies can get"? What are they supposed to do, split in two when they reach a certain size, like an amoeba? I think you'll find that your approach will produce legal chicanery the likes of which you have never before imagined. Yes, I know you want to ban holding companies as well, but let's face it: ain't gonna happen.

Re: Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Depositors of course get paid back via the FDIC (at a cost to taxpayers)."

At a cost to FDIC-insured banks. The insurance fee rises are more bailouts are necessary and the fund gets low. Taxpayers are only on the hook if the fund isn't large enough and if the FDIC can't reasonably charge a level to make it enough.

Re:Why is this here?

[Rob Y.]

Unfortunately, sarcasm fails when many of your examples are pretty good ones for breaking up: The biggest banks, Comcast, consolidated airlines...

Re: Why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking at statistics, but there're several companies that are similarly large if not larger. Top US based Oil Companies, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart?

Then if you're looking at top 10 employers by number employees

1) Walmart 2.2 million
2) yum brands 523k
3) McD 440k
4) IBM 434k
5) UPS 399k
6) Target 361k
7) Kroger 343k
8) Home Depot 340k
9) HP 331k
10) GE 305k

---

By Revenue

1) Walmart $485b
2) Berkshire Hathaway $223b
3) Apple $215b
4) Exxon Mobile $205b
5) McKesson $198b
6) United Health $184b
7) CVS Health $177b
8) General Motors $166b
9) AT&T $163b
10) Ford Motor Company $151b

I mean, ultimately, what do we use as grading rubric to determine if a company needs to be split up? Like if they went bankrupt would the entire world suddenly go into a panic? Or is it when they go bankrupt, the banks and private investors that bank them would go bankrupt? Or because they overtly have a lot of control of the internet and the way news and information flow around the world?

I sort of feel that the issue is more political in nature than it is size.

Here's a list of companies that spend a lot of money lobbying:
(figures from 2016)

1) US Chamber of Commerce (103m)
2) National Association of Realtors (64m)
3) Blue Cross/Shield (25m)
4) American Hospital Association (22m)
5) Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (19m)
6) American Medical Association (19m)
7) Boeing Co (17m)
8) National Association of Broadcasters (16m)
9) AT&T (16m)
10) Business Roundtable (15m)
11) Alphabet, Inc (Google) (15m)
12) Comcast (14m)
13) Southern Co (Electric Utility) (13m)
14) Dow Chemical (13m)
15) Lockheed Martin (13m)
16) NCTA The Internet & Television Association (13m)
17) FedEx Corp (12m)
18) Northrop Grumman (12m)
19) Exxon Mobil (11m)
20) Amazon (11m) ...Facebook (8.6m) ...Apple Inc (4.6m)

----
We're starting to see a bit of a narrative. In comparison to very well established companies in terms of defense, media, telecom, health/pharm, and public utilities, Silicon Valley Tech spends comparatively little on Political Lobbying.

And keep in mind, this is all the money spent lobbying on paper. There's still billions spent on campaigns.

* The Koch Brothers alone spent nearly $300 million on the 2016 election through various outlets.
* Zuckberg pledged $20 million (personal money) in September 2016 to stop Trump. His other political donations haven't been disclosed (if any).
* Jeff Bezos has spent (personal money) less than $200,000 in political donations since 1998.

At least in terms of 2016 numbers.

2017, and beyond, there's been a huge shift in the status quo. The straw that broke the camel's back?

Net neutrality.
---

But what's really happening here? Is Amazon destroying brick and mortar killing capitalism? The idea of capitalism is that having competition gives forth certain benefits, like making sure the best prices are there for both the consumer and the vendor. Also to make sure no one org has complete control of the market allowing them to dictate prices. The assumption is that a single monopoly be self-serving and ultimately evil. But what if that's not the case?

His argument is that social media has been weaponized by foreign intelligence. Blaming the second coming of spam on social media would similar to blaming email chain-letters from 20 years ago on yahoo, earthlink, netcom, aol, compuserve, and hotmail. Just because the methods didn't exist two decades earlier doesn't make the technology the problem.

It's the people that use them.

And lastly, we should think about a personal reason for Galloway to senationalize the breakup of these large companies. He's a professor for crying out loud. He's trying to sell more $35 text books for crissake.

Re: Why is this here?

[kalieaire]

oops, i forgot to login. -_-

Re:Why is this here?

[jafac]

And especially healthcare monopolies. (many local rural regions only have one choice in provider; hospital or diagnostics labs. This drives prices up. If you didn't notice).

Re:Why is this here?

[MitchDev]

Yeah, they should be broken up. The sarcasm was at the the Professor for leaving them off the list :)

Re:Why is this here?

[MitchDev]

Consolidation has just made everything in this country so much worse and even fewer people control even more resources

Re: Why is this here?

[edtice1559]

I read the link. It seems quite alarmist. But it didn't really address the FDIC insurance other than some fear mongering. Basically seems to be that if the FDIC can't repay your losses, you could lose money. I'm not convinced that's a real risk which is probably why this isn't get much mainstream coverage.

Re: Why is this here?

[edtice1559]

This is a good post. Too bad it didn't have your karma modifier. These companies are huge and if any of them were to fail, it would send huge ripples throughout the economy. The primary difference between a real company and a financial company is that real companies use investor capital and money from creditors who get paid a return for their risk. Financial companies tend to use consumer deposits as their source of capital and, as a result, need to be treated differently. That's not to say that maybe we shouldn't look at some of these other companies but it would be a much different line of reasoning.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, that worked great for Ma Bell. Fortunately, we succeeded in getting rid of Bell Labs, and replacing it with Verizon and the falsely-named AT&T. Definitely saved capitalism.

Re:Sure...

[anegg]

The breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly in the United States had significant benefits for consumers. Sure, some of the divested Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCS) managed to reform into regional monopolies, but overall the cost of telephone services plummeted and consumer flexibility and choice increased significantly. I grew up in a household that could only afford to rent one telephone (not one telephone line - one *telephone*) from the phone company, from which we could only afford to make calls within our own town and parts of the adjoining towns (about a 10 square mile area). In-state toll calls were expensive, and out of state long distance was ridiculous. Now I live in a household where for about the same monthly cost (in unadjusted dollars) I can have as many phones as I want, and I can make lengthy calls throughout the United States and Canada all month long for my one fixed price phone service charge.

I think you should pick a different example to make the case that breaking up (true) monopolies doesn't yield benefits.

Re:Sure...

[HornWumpus]

Dad: You can't just plug non-ATT phones into the wall. They can tell by resistance on the ringer...

Kids: Lets try. The worst thing they can do is make us disconnect it...We'll turn off the bell.

Dad: But rules! Rules you heathens.

Our only mistake: Putting an extension in my sisters room. Pre call waiting.

Consider a control: Did rates in nations that didn't breakup their phone monopolies also go way down?

Re:Sure...

[Mashiki]

Consider a control: Did rates in nations that didn't breakup their phone monopolies also go way down?

No, they went up. Canada didn't break up Bell Canada until several years later, nor did they go with deregulation of Bell Canada which held a defacto monopoly in most of the country until the mid-1990's. It wasn't until the marketplace was opened up that LD and local rates fell through the floor. In many parts of Canada, Bell Canada still holds the defacto monopoly on the last mile. If another company wants to sell service for that last mile to their own exchange, they usually pay around $21 of $29 directly to Bell.

Compare that with last mile access for Internet where the last mile is also deregulated. An ISP usually pays around 30-40% of what they charge the customer directly to whoevers lines they are, no matter the speed or package that the customer is paying. So if someone has 30/1Mbs service 30% of $51/mo goes directly to rogers. If the person is paying $79/mo for 75/10Mbps service 35% goes directly to rogers.

Spoiler alert!

[Narcocide]

Everyone was exposed.

Really kind of questionable logic here.

[olsmeister]

So, punishing success will save capitalism? Removing the incentive to succeed will simply encourage people to... well, not succeed.

Re:Really kind of questionable logic here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious, did you take the same stance when many argued to break up Microsoft years back?

Re:Really kind of questionable logic here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did and I've barely used MS products outside of work.

Re: Really kind of questionable logic here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah you should be punished with capitalism, that thing that turns your daughtersâ(TM) pussy into a chat-pussycam-bait career and your great grandparents into slaves (depending on where they lived of course).

Why would you ever want to breakup a bunch of âoemarketingâ companies that try to pass themselves off as tech companies, all their revenue is from Ads â" call them advertising companies and stop letting them get so big by monopolizing their appeal to children and exploiting the lack of privacy on peopleâ(TM)s lives... oh, you have a product to sell? Letâ(TM)s see, this person is chatting about something like that and messaging a friend about their travel plans, we can use âoeexploitâ this knowledge (that used to be private communications) because we own the chat servers and donâ(TM)t think you should have any privacy...

Capitalism pushed IBM to sell census equipment to Nazi Germany, I wonder what wonderful things technology companies looking for profit are doing today?

If you canâ(TM)t see why some people donâ(TM)t like technology companies, you should look passed the balance sheet and see what they are exploiting or if they are only doing good things to increase potential. If itâ(TM)s all negative, like a cigarette company for example, then perhaps the profit is just going to die with their users â" or in the case of modern advertising companies, their consumersâ(TM) attention span will be so short they wonâ(TM)t know who to vote for unless it is a âoetweetâ length appeal to emotions and stupider logic than a tweet can convey. Oh wait, we already have this problem the âoegiant techâ companies gave us because they wanted someone who wouldnâ(TM)t regulate them and who wanted to lower to taxes so the rich could exploit the potential of the masses even more...

Great, we live in the age of âoetweetâ sized logic â" yeah we need to exorcise the demons of capitalism and return to the spiritually pure days of yonder... oh wait, that was the same as today except the banks owned the world and let us rent from them via a death contract that said they owned the whole thing if you died the day before the last payment was due.

We live in a reality bubble created by those in power! Is it time to start playing with the pins and needles and start to poke every large company until they pop?

Re:Really kind of questionable logic here.

[fluffernutter]

If a CEO made $500,000 a year instead of $30 million, I call that successful enough.

Re:Really kind of questionable logic here.

[eepok]

It's kinda the issue inherent in capitalism.

Capitalism Corollary: Market competition by profit motive provides the best product for the best price to the market consumer.

1. The goal of capitalist endeavors is to bring in the maximum profit.
2. High profit is attained providing the best product and maximizing market share.
3. MAXIMUM profit is attained via 100% share.
4. 100% market control is anti-competitive thus reducing the value of the competitive market to the consumer.

The solution (thus far accepted) is to accept that people will seek out 100% market share and to break them up and say, "OK! Let's run the race again under these new controls!"

Re: Really kind of questionable logic here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sotry too Haris to read with all them fabcy adulates Nd all.

There that was me typing on my phone without checking. Spellchecker/stupid-fancy-quote-checkbox whatever.

Re:Really kind of questionable logic here.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kinda the issue inherent in capitalism.
  Capitalism Corollary: Market competition by profit motive provides the best product for the best price to the market consumer.

That's free market, but capitalism can nicely exist without free markets, in fact, without a free market profit can be pushed up even more (for a few).

1. The goal of capitalist endeavors is to bring in the maximum profit.
  2. High profit is attained providing the best product and maximizing market share.

Sometimes, but more often it is done by anti-competitive behaviour (remember DR-DOS) or bribing politicians to pass certain laws.

3. MAXIMUM profit is attained via 100% share.
4. 100% market control is anti-competitive thus reducing the value of the competitive market to the consumer.
The solution (thus far accepted) is to accept that people will seek out 100% market share and to break them up and say, "OK! Let's run the race again under these new controls!"

Unless, of course they are too big to fail.

And even without having an "official" monopoly, the consumer can be screwed nicely, sorry I mean: profits can be maximized without providing the best product

Re:/surprise

[lgw]

I get what he's saying about Facebook and Google (not that I agree - by I understand the argument), but Apple and Amazon? Those are not social networks, or search engines, to shape opinion. Sure, Apple does limit what goes in their store, and Amazon has made a few bad TV shows, but they seem unrelated.

From this I deduce he simply doesn't like large companies, and is fishing for excuses.

No-brainer?

[Rick Schumann]

Last time I checked, aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general? Am I right? All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies. Add Microsoft and AT&T to that list, by the way, just for starters; there are many others, too.

While we're at it, how about we repeal the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law, and also ban them from contributing to political campaigns. In fact, I'd prefer that all campaign funds come from a neutral source, so no corporations or rich individuals can influence politics.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Irregardless of this guy being a marketing professor not economist, etc.

I'm sincerely curious what Apple is monopolizing or why they are included in this list. They only have a big share of the phone market here in the US, and even then it's only 44%. They have a small share of the PC market.

   

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most support for capitalism is based on desire for a stable social hierarchy and not any belief in the market. The vast majority of posts on this thread are going to be opposed to breaking up these companies, because it makes the posters feel good to be in an unquestioned hierarchy even if they're not at the top.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Irregardless of this guy being a marketing professor not economist, etc.

I'm sincerely curious what Apple is monopolizing or why they are included in this list. They only have a big share of the phone market here in the US, and even then it's only 44%. They have a small share of the PC market.

 

Regardless of the quality of your post or opinion, the first word makes me hate you.

Re:No-brainer?

[colonslash]

> aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general?

No, abuse of monopoly power is bad for capitalism. Monopolies are often useful for supplying a service that wouldn't be supplied otherwise, usually because of high barriers to entry.

> All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies

Why, because they're big? What is Apple monopolizing? Phones? No. Computers? No. For Google, Bing is a large competitor, and there are other search engines people could switch to the very next time they search. Walmart is a decent competitor for Amazon. Facebook - Google+, SnapChat, WhatsApp, etc. I don't see how any of these companies have exclusive control to anything.

Re:No-brainer?

[xvan]

WhatsApp is facebook's. Your point still stands.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how any of these companies have exclusive control to anything.

AT&T, Comcast and Verizon on the other hand.

Re:No-brainer?

[gnick]

I'm sincerely curious what Apple is monopolizing or why they are included in this list.

Obviously we have monopolies directly competing with each other in populated markets. Simple.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add Microsoft and AT&T to that list, by the way, just for starters; there are many others, too.

Definitely. Add Comcast to that list.

Captcha = overtake

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

If corporations are people, then they should be held accountable legally speaking. If someone dies as a result of using a company's product, the company is charged with involuntary manslaughter, unless they find evidence that the company knew about the issue that caused the death and ignored it/covered it up, then you get second degree murder. Being a member of the C-Suite at a company should mean that you are on the hook to serve the sentence on behalf of the company in such cases. The one exception would be in cases where the death penalty is issued, then the company is automatically nationalized. Then it can be liquidated, become a permanent part of the government, or the government can make whatever reforms deemed necessary and then have a new IPO.

If corporations are people, they should also be taxed on their overseas income, just like you and I would be. That's separate from repatriating all that cash companies have sitting in bank accounts in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. They should also have to pay into social security, medicare/medicaid, and unemployment just like you and I do.

I can pretty much guarantee that if corporations had to accept the potential downsides of personhood, they would be doing a full court press to lobby the government to strip them of that classification. And before someone says it, I agree, some of those tax ideas are stupid, and I'm all in favor of changing them, but that's besides the point.

As for political contributions, I would personally like to see all campaigns be taxpayer funded. Everyone gets $X to run their campaign based on the office they're running for. You cannot spend any of your own money, people cannot donate to your campaign, no outside groups are allowed to run political ads of any kind, and it has to last you the entire campaign. If you drop out of the race, you have to give back any remaining funds. Ideally, this would dramatically shorten the campaign season, and mean that politicians can focus on their jobs, not fundraising. Then we can toss the whole of Congress into government housing, like a college dorm, so they have to live with the people they work with, and maybe some of this partisan tantrum throwing will go away... or we'll hear stories about two members of congress getting into a fist fight and have a good laugh. There should even be an office for the president in the capitol building, and it be mandated that the president spend a certain number of hours there per week to meet with members of congress regarding legislation.

Re:No-brainer?

[ausekilis]

Add in some fixes to the income gap as well. CEO's in Sweden only make low 7 digits, any more and they are criticized. Stateside, many CEO's make 8 and 9 digit salaries. Not to mention stock options and other nonsense they get. I'd love to see a law that states "A CEO cannot earn more than n times his/her employees average salary". Even better if 'n' were 15, and instead of average it were lowest salary. Give the low-level worker bees a living wage and invest that CEO wallet padding into productivity somewhere.

You can figure with corporate overhead, insurance, lights/power/water and such for a typical worker you're looking at *actual cost* for an employee is 3x their salary. You *could* cut Alphabet's CEO's salary to $100M/yr and afford to pay a whole corporation of 300 people $100k/year including that huge factor of overhead. Realistically it'd be more like 600 folks at $100k a year (assuming 50% overhead instead of 200%). Does one person really contribute that much more than 600 to earn such a crazy high salary?

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopolies are often useful for supplying a service that wouldn't be supplied otherwise, usually because of high barriers to entry.

Bullshit. That has nothing to do with being a monopoly and only to do with being a large enough company.
If the market doesn't provide the service because o high barriers to entry the best option is for the government to step in and overcome that barrier.
Otherwise the service will be locked to a single company that can use the barrier to make a disproportional profit and use that profit to push smaller companies out of other markets.
Monopolies are not good for anything but making sure that money is gathered in a single account and making the economy stagnate.

Re:No-brainer?

[gbjbaanb]

Maybe Monopoly is not the right word, cartel might be a better one. As you can use any one of a number of messaging apps, social media portals, etc, but they're all the same.

Re:No-brainer?

[Whibla]

Last time I checked, aren't monopolies bad for capitalism...?

Actually monopolies are the logical end-point of capitalism. Without regulation, and given enough time, there would only be a monopoly company masquerading as a competing duopoly.

I believe a similar logical outcome is evident in politics, where it's a mathematical 'certainty' that any democracy will end up in a two party state.

While we're at it, how about we repeal the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law, and also ban them from contributing to political campaigns

Totally with you on this, although I'm not completely sure how such a ban could ever be implemented, given how subjective such a topic would be (after all, when a newspaper, owned by a company, reports on politics - and as we'd want to be an informed electorate this is something we'd want - who's to judge whether they are or aren't campaigning?).

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Average CEO in the US makes around $200K.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm

The AFL-CIO purposely makes inflated claims of CEO salary in the US by only looking at the top couple of hundred companies in the US where maybe the top two or three Swedish company might make the list if they were American and their CEOs are not paid too far off what similarly sized US companies pay their CEOs.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law"

It's just laziness, combined with the consequences of race-to-the-bottom state politics. One of the most obvious problems with Citizens United decision is the failure to recognize that the power to create is the flipside of the power to destroy. There's literally nothing stopping Delaware from passing a law indicating that its corporations may not make political contributions- other than the venality of their own politicians and their desire to hold on to its status as the US incorporation capital.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that $200K average wage for a CEO is not counting grants of stock or options, which is the bulk of executive compensation. It's the same reason they can symbolically lower their salary to $1/year and still live like kings.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe a similar logical outcome is evident in politics, where it's a mathematical 'certainty' that any democracy will end up in a two party state.

I'm pretty sure that's not a characteristic of democracy in general, only of democracy with first-past-the-post voting.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, regardless and irregardless are both equally old, but come from different roots. Irregardless dates back at least to 1795, and is a form of a double negative, used originally in a humorous context- the quality of not caring if something is without a guard. It could have been disregardless, from disregard, but that isn't as funny. (Irregard has fallen completely out of common use.)
Flammable and inflammable are similarly confused; Flammable means merely something that can burn. Inflammable is a burning that takes a direct action. Flammable comes from the noun "Flame"; inflammable comes from the verb "To Inflame". One inflames a crowd, unless one has a flamethrower handy and is prepared to use it. Thus the origin of the old USENET shibboleth of "Flaming" in posts, preceded by the interjection "Flame On!".
That inflammable has sometimes come to mean something that can't burn, is just common ignorance.

Captcha: discord

Re:No-brainer?

[upl8n87447]

There are two... TWO... major phone brands. Samsung and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software platforms... Android and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software marketplaces. Itunes and Play Store.

This is about as close as you can come to a monopoly; and is absolutely leading to higher prices and a problematic distribution of wealth. These companies don't need to go behind the curtain to price fix. Samsung can simply let Apple lead the way in setting astronomical prices on their handsets, components, and software sales because fanbois and those fearing change will continue buying them at those prices. As people lock themselves into a given phone platform (Apple / Android) they tend to stick with it. Not simply out of loyalty, but out of not having to understand the opposing software. It's effectively a free line of profit for the company where they won't lose customers. Samsung just follows Apple's lead and price their handsets at a slightly cheaper price.

Smart phone prices are way over the top... how much profit is Apple making per iPhone X? 50-60% margins?

Once a person has a smart phone in hand, Apple absolutely is monopolizing the software sales end of their hardware, just as Google is absolutely monopolizing the software end of their OS.

Add to this that ALL companies are employing cheap Chinese laborers to manufacture the phones, while continuing to raise the prices of the handsets, leading to a direct transfer of wealth from the many to the few. This alone should result in a penalty for the company. If the manufacturing workers were paid based on the market the phones were sold in, there would be a much better distribution of the revenue from the phone sale. That isn't happening, money is transferring upwards. Apple's now approaching $300 billion in *cash* with no sign of a slowing of its cash hoarding, and is approaching a $1 trillion market cap.

We need them to spend that money back into the economy... the kicker is that if they do, they'll likely buy up even more talent than they already have, buy up more companies that are potentially their competitors, and make it even more impossible than it already is for new real competition to enter the market.

On the contrary, consider the solar panel industry where there are MANY companies and substantial competition. With each new and improved panel, the prices go down per watt.

It doesn't take a genius to realize something's wrong. Just look at the profit margins. It's a very easy sign that there simply isn't enough competition in the market, and it's resulting in a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few. Horrible for the economy, horrible for innovation, and horrible for society.

Re:No-brainer?

[jeremyp]

There are two... TWO... major phone brands. Samsung and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software platforms... Android and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software marketplaces. Itunes and Play Store.

This is about as close as you can come to a monopoly; and is absolutely leading to higher prices and a problematic distribution of wealth.

No, really it isn't. The closest you can come to a monopoly is one brand. I thought that was bleeding obvious.

Your analysis is wrong anyway. There are plenty of mobile phone manufacturers, it is just that only Apple and Samsung make phones desirable enough to sell at a profit. It's not their fault that everybody else is in a race to the bottom.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopolies are bad for capitalism like self-righteousness is bad for religion. It's an inevitable consequence.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

You *could* cut Alphabet's CEO's salary to $100M/yr and afford to pay a whole corporation of 300 people $100k/year including that huge factor of overhead.

The CEO of Alphabet is Larry Page and his salary is a token $1. Because of his large ownership stake in the company, his compensation doesn't include any stock.

The Alphabet and Google C-suite executives (Pichai, Porat, Drummond, etc...) make $650K as a salary with additional stock if they meet their performance goals. Likewise at Apple, the C-suite executives (Cook, Cue, Ive, etc...) make $800K annually while the bulk of their compensation is in stock.

Perhaps you should know what you are talking about before commenting.

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sincerely curious what Apple is monopolizing or why they are included in this list. They only have a big share of the phone market here in the US, and even then it's only 44%. They have a small share of the PC market.

You might as well say they only have a small percentage of the food market. It's completely irrelevant.

Every patent and copyright they hold is a monopoly. They have a lot of these - so they have an enormous number of monopolies.

Re:No-brainer?

[lsatenstein]

What you are proposing is the law in other countries. It was the law in the USA.

For the 2018 election, I read where the KOCH brothers have allocated 400 million dollars to get their slaves in congess and the senate (re)elected.

The USA is a pseudo-democracy

Re:No-brainer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citizens United didn't say "corporations are people", it said that people who organize don't lose rights they already had. Unions are typically organized as (non-profit) corporations too, as are most advocacy groups. Should they not be allowed to make campaign contributions?

Let me guess - his funding....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that he didn't mention Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,.....you know, the banks that fucked up the economy and then got a big government handout for their illegal actions.

You want save capitalism, break them up and jail their bosses.

Such bullshit

[fustakrakich]

The content providers aren't the problem. All our troubles lie with the service providers. That is the monopoly and collusion we have to break up. We open up that market, provide real P2P service with no single point of failure such as your present day ISP, and everything else will fall into place.

Re:Such bullshit

[SeaFox]

The content providers aren't the problem. All our troubles lie with the service providers.

You're right! The problem isn't the content provider, ComcastNBCUniversal, it's the service provider, ComcastNBCUniversal. Good thing we didn't direct our anger at the wrong corporation.

Re:Such bullshit

[fustakrakich]

Well, the headline says Amazon,Google, Apple, and Facebook. As long as they can't atop anybody else from coming online, there's nothing to regulate or "break up". Come to think of it, the same would go for the service providers, and that's where the problem is. Government protection enables them to block out competition...

I'm sorry, what were you saying?

Re:/surprise

[the_skywise]

Of all of them I think the only one that can actually affect "capitalism" (and is to a certain extent) is Amazon.

Change the fundamentals

[substance2003]

I think the problem with breaking up these companies is that it doesn't resolve the fundamentals that permitted them to come into being in the 1st place.
Breaking them up just means that it will happen again in the future unless we change was made it possible to begin with.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[PPH]

doesn't resolve the fundamentals that permitted them to come into being in the 1st place.

Preferential tax treatment for mergers and acquisitions.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[lgw]

Notice MS isn't on that list. These companies mostly grew organically - Google's probably acquired the most, but to small effect. Amazon's largest acquisition was the company that made robots for their warehouses (and had no other customers). I don't think there's an M&A theme for why these particular companies are so large.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[lgw]

I don't see the problem with these companies being large: the only company on that list that seems to have an effective monopoly is Facebook (though I guess Google is close), and that's just the nature of social networks - everyone wants to be on the same one. In any case these near-monopolies seem to be the result of customer choice. Most phones aren't iPhones, and in retail Walmart has 3x the revenue of Amazon, so I don't see any sort of issue there.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[Anonymous Coward]

These companies mostly grew organically

No kickbacks to the finance Jew. Microsoft has done their bit to keep Goldman Sachs in business. Amazon and Google need to be broken up. So more IPO fees for (((them))).

NYU professor Scott Galloway

Professor at the Leonard N. (((Stern))) School of Business.

Well, I'm surprised.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[Anonymous Coward]

The original purpose of US anti-trust law was to break up companies that had grown so big that their political power was distorting the will of the people and buying politicians. That changed sometime in the later 20th century into a more corporate-friendly policy of only breaking up companies if they abused their power to keep consumer prices artificially high. Companies prefer to be limited in that way rather than from being prevented from changing the laws and leaders that overall benefit them more.

Re:Change the fundamentals

[Anonymous Coward]

Kiva Systems most certainly had other customers before Amazon bought them.

No coherent argument

[david.emery]

At least not in the article (I didn't watch the video). These companies are not the same. Facebook controls 'views' and advertising. Google controls 'search' and advertising, but of course there are alternatives for search. Amazon controls sales and delivery. Apple provides widely used, but not dominant, phones and computers.

Trying to make an argument that they're collectively the same is flat-assed wrong. And size itself is not a sufficient justification for government intervention.

Amazon, Google and Facebook arguably have potential monopolies in their markets, but each does have competitors. Apple clearly has viable competitors in each of its markets.

But hey, this guy gets to go around making bogus arguments, and probably collects nice speaking fees as well as a lot of clicks and publicity.

Re:No coherent argument

[Danathar]

The other thing thats a problem is actually defining "Monopoly". People throw that term around left and right without context. There is legal "monopoly" as in anti-trust, there is market monopoly which is more of a statement about market power, etc.

Re:No coherent argument

[david.emery]

Excellent point! I was using 'monopoly' in the legal sense (at least that's what I intended, IANAL.)

Re:No coherent argument

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think Facebook only controls views, you have no idea how Facebook works; and more to the point, you have no idea how the corporations that want to work with Facebook work. And Galloway's point isn't about what Facebook does on their website, it's about what Facebook's website does to people. Or did you miss the part about the correlation between teenagers' depression and social media?

Both Google and Amazon are bigger in market cap and market share than either IBM in the 70s and Microsoft in the 90s when they underwent anti-trust investigation. Breaking them up should have happened 5-6 years ago.

Re:No coherent argument

[Anonymous Coward]

These companies were listed just because Joe Sixpack has a conniption fit anytime they're mentioned. It's mostly a knee jerk styled marketing tactic. No different than the working class who bemoans many institution as "Big [whatever]" until you ask them where their 401k investments are.

Re:No coherent argument

[Anonymous Coward]

The tech giants are a new kind of company so it requires a new interpretation of what kinds of harm they may be causing society or what kind of excessive power they may have. Certainly most of Google's services are free as in beer to the masses, and Amazon puts high priority on lowering prices. But the way they amass data about everybody, and the AI tools they're building to apply that data to their corporate benefit, and the power that applied data gives them over the political process and lawmakers, is troubling to say the least. It's a new phenomenon that our old categories have difficulty addressing, but this amassing of power is at least akin to the abuses that led to anti-trust action a century ago. We can debate exactly how much that applies and how, but there's certainly a family resemblance.

Re:No coherent argument

[Tony Isaac]

Your main point is spot on. But there is one misconception regarding monopolies.

Being a monopoly does not mean that there are no competitors. Rather, it means that you dominate a market to the point that other businesses or customers can't afford to NOT be your customer.

For example, if you are a typical mom-and-pop shop, you'd better be listed on Google Maps. If you're not on Google Maps, I won't find you, it's that simple. Sure, you can go to Bing Maps, but the vast majority of the market won't bother to do that. They'll just move on to the next business that IS on Google.

Microsoft was once ordered to decouple Internet Explorer from Windows, forced by the courts to allow users to choose other browsers. Sure, there were other operating systems, but for most people, Windows was the only one that mattered.

Re:No coherent argument

[kalieaire]

he's trying to sell another textbook.  he's a professor afterall.

Re:/surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Source?

Idiotic Reasoning

[StormReaver]

This is another in a long line of idiotic articles. If we limit ourselves to technology companies, there remains only one company that really needs to be broken up: Microsoft.

None of the companies listed impose any barriers to entry that are under their direct control, and eliminating stupid patents would also eliminate all of those barriers (money is not a significant barrier) in the fields dominated by the companies listed in the article. Every single one of those companies has viable alternatives to everything they produce.

Microsoft is the only technology company in existence that has barriers to entry under its direct, monopolistic control; and is therefore the only technology company that needs to be broken up. This is as true now as it was back in 1999.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[CanHasDIY]

What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[TheRealMindChild]

Microsoft is the only technology company in existence that has barriers to entry under its direct, monopolistic control

And what would those be? Operating Systems? Development Environments? Hell, software in general? None of those... there are plenty of competitors in those spaces. What exactly are you talking about?

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You can easily shop stuff from other places than Amazon, unless it's actually made by/for Amazon. Various business or industry systems running on PCs are bound to MS' platform, though, and switching to something else is more difficult than switching to a new bakery for your morning croissants. The network effect sucks in this case.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[Pyramid]

If they're driven out of business by anti-competitive practices, you can't shop there.

Amazon is on the cusp of becoming the largest retailer *and* media company *and* (cloud) computing company

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[angel'o'sphere]

On Windows ... the OS, not the thing you look out from.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[stephanruby]

Windows Phone.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[WallyL]

Desktop-installed office productivity suites for enterprise.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[Rob Y.]

Their barrier to entry is owning the ability to run Windows applications - which are still the lion's share of desktop apps. None of the competitors can reliably do that. Munich - for all their efforts - ultimately caved to that barrier as well. Of course, politics (and perhaps a touch of bribery) contributed there too. But seriously, after what? 10 years, they still had problems dealing with existing Windows apps for which there was no suitable substitute.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud computing thing bothers me more than the rest, there's a lot of critical infrastructure more or less under their control now. Who cares about retail and media?

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[StormReaver]

What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?

Microsoft still has an abusive monopoly on desktop operating systems.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[sgt_doom]

Operating systems, last time I checked?!

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[EmptyHead]

Their products are devolving to the point of creating barriers to entry to themselves, yet their monopolistic power is so great that they still don't lose market share. I own licenses to office 365 and still use OpenOffice as my default because it doesn't crash nearly as often. Server 2016 - especially with Exchange is just hideous to manage compared to previous versions. It's bad. Yet, there still isn't a viable alternative.

Re:Idiotic Reasoning

[Mordaximus]

What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?

Microsoft still has an abusive monopoly on desktop operating systems.

I'm more concerned with their abusive monopoly on office applications. A lot of businesses might consider a different path for operating systems if not for Microsoft Office.

Better beakup the FBI, NSA, & CIA too.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are vital instruments of American corporate power to hegemony. With them there will NEVER be a free market.

Translation

[lucasnate1]

Capitalism needs socialism in order to avoid becoming like Somalia. The same is probably true in the other direction as well. Too bad that people that think that radicalized version of these two are silver bullets that solve everything.

Re:Translation

[cascadingstylesheet]

Capitalism needs socialism in order to avoid becoming like Somalia.

Somalia looks like Google, Amazon, and Facebook?

Or America looks like Somalia?

I'm not following your argument here.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are describing is Social Democracy, mainstream in the Nordic countries but vilified as Ultra Extreme Left by the swivel-eyed loonies who control the press/media in the US/UK; witness the hammering the British tabloid press give the Labour Party, concocting any amount of shit in an attempt to keep the Overton window on the hard right end of the scale.

NYU should be broken up as well - taking up 1/2 NY

[Anonymous Coward]

Through their sheer size and political connections, they bought up half of Village in NYC that was available for development.

Break up tech companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you have two (or more) Apples? How do you have two Facebooks?

How, precisely, do you "break up" a tech company? And what effect is it supposed to have?

Re:Break up tech companies?

[eliphalet]

I recall that during the Microsoft antitrust suit, someone pointed out that if you broke Microsoft into 4 pieces, the next day 4 salespeople from very large companies would be calling on every business customer, each pushing a still-dominant product/service.

Re:Break up tech companies?

[ale2011]

A possible breaking tool is fiscal treatment. Each country should take a look at how many other countries a given company is incorporated in. Then, apply taxes accordingly, possibly coordinating with the other countries. Tax rates should be so steep that giant companies would prefer to split, lest being beaten by smaller competitors.

At a quick glance, prof Galloway doesn't seem to consider democracy as an ingredient of those "love affairs". It is well known that investors are rather oriented toward increasing their own revenue than doing The Right Thing. A democratic company should have a policy which provides for employees voting for managers, in the hope that workers know what they're doing. Democratic election is a flawed process which not always results in electing the best leaders, but it's still the least worse model the human race has ever found...

Here is the proposal:

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Let's, cut App Store off the Apple Hardware Business
2. Let's cut Amazon's logistics business off its Amazon.com business
3. Let's abolish Net neutrality and Google will die by itself without HTML and JavaScript
4. I don't see any problems with Facebook I don't use it :-)

wrong target

[swell]

If you want to break stuff up start with oil companies and banks- companies 'too big to fail' that have already failed and become even bigger. These companies crush innovation, control our elected officials and pretty much run the world as they please.

If you break them up,

[jenningsthecat]

then by definition you are destroying capitalism, not saving it. Not that I think that's a bad thing - it's simply important to replace capitalism with something better, not the something-worse represented by the companies in question.

I also find it interesting that Galloway decries the "new gods", yet seems totally unaware that they are the logical and inevitable outcome of capitalism. Also, the irony that he himself worships the "old god" called Capitalism seems totally lost on him.

Re:If you break them up,

[Anonymous Coward]

No. "The Wealth of Nations", which is the original work defining capitalism, describes the need to break up monopolies.

You shouldn't ever make any comments on capitalism until you've read that book, and it's prequel "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" which is essential reading to understand Wealth of Nations. Not just you, but many people. It's currently impossible to have a sensible discussion about capitalism because almost nobody has bothered to find out what it is. I include both those in favour and those against capitalism in that statement.

I've seen "pro-capitalists" argue against things essential to capitalism, I've also seen "anti-capitalists" argue in favour of aspects of capitalism, all because people can't be bothered learning what they're talking about.

Re:If you break them up,

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism isn't the same as monopoly rule. Most pro-capitalists agree that for a capitalistic economy to function, monopolies have to be broken up. In fact there is little distinction between a centrally-planned economy (what used to be called bureaucratic socialism before 1989) and a monopoly. When a private actor becomes "too big to fail" the recurrent crises that are inherent to capitalism become harder to manage and potentially catastrophic, as we've seen ten years ago. Private actors don't have the absolute power that a state has, but by their economic power and lack of accountability/exposure they might pose a comparable threat.

What laws have they broken?

[macsimcon]

Apple has a smaller share of the smartphone market than Android. Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology? Is Google forcing Mozilla or Apple to make Google the default search engine? Google is capturing everything it can about all of us, but have they ever sold that information, or let it loose through negligence? I can think of several government agencies which have compromised private data more than Google ever has.

Facebook might be another story. They've lied repeatedly to their users about what information they're collecting, but given the platform's popularity, it doesn't seem that their users care. If you're not paying for a service, and the provider of that service lies to you, what are your damages?

Amazon is the worst offender. They intentionally lose money, and they use their market clout to enter new markets and drive existing competition under so they can capture marketshare, and so we assume they will raise prices once the competition is gone. Isn't this just like the semiconductor dumping of the '70s?

I don't like that Amazon rules online shopping, I don't like that Google rules search, but should we really break companies up just for being successful? If that's what's best for the consumer, maybe I could see that, but not when the notion is coming from a single academic rather than the public or their representatives.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[Dixie_Flatline]

So Google is the only one I have an answer for, but after that, I still don't know how you'd break them up.

The problem with Google is network effects: Google's product gets better the more people use it, because fundamentally, their product is based on data. So the more you use it and find things, the more you reinforce their search algorithms, which means that searches are better. So you keep coming back and using their search engine because it gives the best results, and so the cycle goes. These compounding effects are hard to beat, so it's hard for other search engines—even if it were possible to write markedly better search algorithms—to compete.

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search, but I still type in !g (open this current search in Google) a lot for certain things. Google simply returns the best results, and they're a long way from getting caught.

But how do you fix that? Literally any solution here would make the user experience worse.

And to go even further back, that's why these organisations are powerful. Google has the best search experience, Amazon has the best shopping experience. Facebook has the best (???) social network experience (or at the very least, the most comprehensive, by virtue of having the biggest network—again, compounding network effects are in action here), and Apple has what we could call the best device ecosystem experience, perhaps. (Even as an Apple user, that distinction is fairly tenuous. Not because of anything they've done recently per se, but of all the companies listed, they have the most subjective experience. You can quantify the experience for all the others in some way or another.)

But I don't know how one would break up any of these companies. Breaking up Amazon in any meaningful way would make it not Amazon. ACS separate from Amazon the store? Okay, sure, but what does that actually get any of us as consumers? Split Google (Alphabet, I guess) up? Into what—Android and Search divisions? Would that even matter? Apple doesn't even have the biggest market share in anything, so I have no idea how you'd be able to make any anti-trust claims against them, just because they make the most money. And Facebook...the only thing you might be able to do is force them to let you retain ownership of your social graph—that's where the real value is. If you could ship that around to other networks transparently, it might make it more possible for other social networks to compete, but that has nothing to do with breaking them up.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Obviously when I replied, I was more responding to "Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology?" than "What laws have they broken?"

On that question, the answer is obviously: nothing that would deserve anti-trust scrutiny.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[angel'o'sphere]

Apple has a smaller share of the smartphone market than Android
Never heard about a company called "Android".

Your sentence makes as much sense as "Porsche has a smaller share of the cars market than all other luxury car makers together"

I hope you don't invest your money on the stock market with such brain dead thoughts.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[Dixie_Flatline]

I would worry more about how your rigid pedantry doesn't allow you to glean meaning from sentences that are sufficiently correct. You know perfectly well what they were saying and why that's a relevant metric in the smartphone market. The fact that Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices is a meaningless tautology, and comparing iOS' market share to that of Android is the only meaningful metric when talking about an anti-trust action that might be taken against Apple. They simply don't hold enough of the smartphone market to claim they're using their dominant position in the market to do anything untoward.

It doesn't matter that Apple sells more smartphones than most manufacturers of Android handsets, they still don't hold anything close to a monopoly no matter how you slice it.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[cascadingstylesheet]

They intentionally lose money, and they use their market clout to enter new markets and drive existing competition under so they can capture marketshare, and so we assume they will raise prices once the competition is gone.

I keep hearing that, but the assumed last step never seems to happen.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Facebook...the only thing you might be able to do is force them to let you retain ownership of your social graph—that's where the real value is. If you could ship that around to other networks transparently, it might make it more possible for other social networks to compete, but that has nothing to do with breaking them up.

I could see something like this. Require Facebook to federate with other social networks. To ensure the requisite API is adequate, break Facebook itself into several pieces that would have to federate with each other.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[upl8n87447]

Shorten their patents, tax higher margins at a higher rate, tax overall profits at a higher rate as they increase... etc. Use said taxes to fund start ups (tax incentives). These things weaken their hold on the industry by increasing their prices the more powerful they get, and strengthening the up and comers.

There's no problem with a company having success. The problem is that success usually results in more success and anti-competitive behavior. Let it go for long enough without control, and we get these anti-competitive, cash-hoarding, overseas capital stashing, loophole creating/using, behemoths that are bad for the economy and society and lead to massive transference of wealth upwards from *everyone* to the hands of the wealthiest few.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[upl8n87447]

So between these two massive companies, you don't see serious anti-competitive behavior? One problem I see is that people only think a monopoly effect occurs when a single company is in a market. However, in this case we're talking about one behemoth that's competing with a second behemoth in the market. The fact is that the competition between these companies isn't as fierce as necessary to drive prices down and innovation up... as we can see from the massive margins the handset makers are making on each sale, and with no stopping the rising handset prices.

Clearly the OS / handset makers are more than happy to put out modest annual improvements in their software/hardware without overtaking one another and ride the wave of profits.

Plus, it's not just that these companies *only* make handsets, or *only* make software. They're buying up all related technology company IP, their patent portfolios, their user bases, and under the immense umbrella of wealth that these companies maintain, making it absolutely impossible for competition to flourish. For those software companies that they don't buy, the apps are sold on *their* marketplaces anyways, where they take a significant cut of the proceeds.

In effect, these behemoth companies are capable of throwing massive loads of money at smaller innovative companies that hold IP that they need in their software/hardware to maintain a firm grip on the market.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology?

,P>With their foundational patents, yes they have.

Is Google forcing Mozilla or Apple to make Google the default search engine?

Forcing? I guess some people consider huge payouts to be coercive. They're certainly anti-comeptitve and sponsored by kickbacks, not because Mozilla/Apple think Google is the best.

Google is capturing everything it can about all of us, but have they ever sold that information, or let it loose through negligence?

Yes, yes they have. Well, not me personally, but there have indeed been cases of them doing that. Not in bulk losses, but in breeches for individual uses (and bystanders)

ut should we really break companies up just for being successful?

Yes, yes we should. Because otherwise they'll prevent the next huge company from revolutionizing our space.

Re:What laws have they broken?

[angel'o'sphere]

they still don't hold anything close to a monopoly
That was not the topic, or was it?

Step 1: collect underpants

[dingleberrie]

If you break them up then they can be replaced by Huawei, Samsung, Tencent, and Baidu.
Is that a better outcome?

Re:Step 1: collect underpants

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Best argument I've heard against breaking them up. Note, I really do think that they are too huge... but if some company has to be too huge, I'd rather it not be the ones you listed.

why stop there?

[micahraleigh]

Why not save the DNC by breaking it up into 5 parts (just like the 2 parts right before the Civil War)?

Then we can save Hollywood by blowing that up into pieces also.

Teachers unions, CNN, the UN, the IRS, the FBI, and the NEA.

Don't forget NYU !

Re:why stop there?

[magarity]

Then we can save Hollywood by blowing that up into pieces also.

Will Michael Bay direct that?

Re:why stop there?

[Locke2005]

I'm all in favor of creating a viable third party. But you can't expect the same people that profit from the two party system to change it! That's the same reason elimination of he electoral college or real campaign finance reform are very unlikely.

Re:why stop there?

[micahraleigh]

XD ... ya, I guess that's already been done

Re: You were too poor for college

[Anonymous Coward]

We know. We know. We can tell every time you speak.

But you're smarter than those ivory tower "leftist" eggheads anyways. You've always known it to be true in your gut. Where truth lies.. in the guts of morans.

USA is already socialist...

[stilrz]

Milton Freedmen stated the USA is already 47% socialist and that was before the last communist prez was sworn in. Nearly all of the top performing companies make it and then make it BIG by/with large contracts with the government or other special treatment.

Re: USA is already socialist...

[Anonymous Coward]

Milton Freedmen stated the USA is already 47% socialist and that was before the last communist prez was sworn in.

Nearly all of the top performing companies make it and then make it BIG by/with large contracts with the government or other special treatment.

I was gonna run that through Google translate but they don't have a Gibberish to English translation feature.

Re: USA is already socialist...

[Anonymous Coward]

translation of 2nd sentence:

Small companies innovate and serve the customer. When they are successful and grow past a certain size, they try to use their wealth to buy influence and use government to stifle competition.

Large companies can handle onerous regulations better than small companies, so onerous regulation is a competitive advantage.

Here's the first google result for: large companies don't suffer from regulation

http://www.freedomworks.org/content/big-corporations-and-big-government-go-hand-hand

Better version of the talk

[Anonymous Coward]

Scott Galloway Says Amazon, Apple, Facebook, And Google should be broken up. This one has less introductory clutter. Well worth watching. After giving a number of emotional reasons why someone might break up these companies, he concludes with the one reason that any good capitalist should agree with: More competition is better for all of us.

Re:Better version of the talk

[xvan]

So, to make a google competitor, he should all put up with sub par search engines for the sake of what?

Re:Better version of the talk

[lgw]

Personally, I think duckduckgo is better than google, so I use it. That's the point here really: people are already free to use the search engine they want, and he's not satisfied with that consumer choice and wants to force his own ideas on people. Not good.
 

Re:Better version of the talk

[Anonymous Coward]

Use duckduckgo. I've yet to see where google provides better results, but YMMV.

While we're at it how about the airlines

[rsilvergun]

and telecom (anyone remember the John Oliver bit where he showed AT&T had bought up all the Bells they'd been forced to break off from?).

All I can say is good luck. You're trying to fix something that's fundamentally broken. It didn't work when we did it to AT&T. Better to regulate and live with the reality of mega-corps than to pretend you can break up these kinds of large power structures.

Re:While we're at it how about the airlines

[Locke2005]

Airlines are somewhat natural monopolies, like chip manufacturers. To some extent, for a given area, a telecom is a natural monopoly, much like an electric utility. For electric utilities, the maintenance of the grid and the production of power should be separate functions; perhaps telecom could be handled in the same way: have one company maintain the "last mile", and let any company that wants plug into it... but that would require Net Neutrality, wouldn't it?

Re:While we're at it how about the airlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, giving in is the ONLY way to fix these problems!

Re:While we're at it how about the airlines

[HornWumpus]

When airports do a shitty job and end up with anywhere close to a monopoly airline, ticket prices go crazy and service goes to shit. I'm thinking of MSP.

For electric generation, local distribution is a natural monopoly, there can only be one control center so Independent system operator (ISO). All the other functions (generation, interconnect) are best run as a competitive market.

Sure you get situations like PG&E 'owning' the bay area because they own the links. The fix for that is more transmission into the bay area. SF would PUD out in a second, but they know they're captive to PG&E anyhow. They should run high tension lines above/below the high speed rail/caltrain right of way. But greenies: 'Oh noes EMF.'

Re:While we're at it how about the airlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor correction. One of the baby bells, Southwestern Bell, bought up most of the Bells and AT&T.

Re:While we're at it how about the airlines

[stikves]

PG&E can be overcome, but not all cities have done the necessary work. For example, in Santa Clara, you get power from city owned facilities, making the cost 1/4 of your neighboring cities (at highest tiers, compared to San Jose, and Sunnyvale, etc).

Even at those high prices there were a lot of outages in San Jose last year during the stormy season. I don't believe I remember such frequent events in non-PGE areas.

Also it is alleged that they have caused the recent wildfires in the Northern California due to lack of clearance between power lines and branches.

If that is true, it tells a lot. This much negligence, with these high costs of service can only happen in insufficiently regulated monopolies.

Chrome and android should be seperate.

[Anonymous Coward]

They both should be independent of Google for the good of the web ecosystem We need more than just Mozilla who we know has its flaws. Webkit from Safari should be independent of Apple on iOS as well.

Re:Chrome and android should be seperate.

[Locke2005]

What's the business model for maintaining a free OS and web browser, separate from using it to leverage ad sales?

Too late

[PopeRatzo]

Capitalism cannot be saved any more than a tadpole can be saved after it has turned into a frog. What we have today in the US doesn't resemble capitalism. We have a crony corporatism on meth. It's what capitalism looks like when it metastasizes.

This was all predicted, by the way, by a little-known 19th century German economist named, Karl Marx.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - because his economic theories worked oh so well in Russia, China, Cuba and now add Venezuela to the list - that's what socialism looks like EVERYTIME its tried.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Both systems (capitalism & socialism/communism) in their pure states have massive shortcomings. The natural tendency of capitalism is for wealth to concentrate in a small group of companies/families and the government to pander to those companies/families at the expense of the average person who barely scrapes by. The natural tendency of socialism/communism is for power to concentrate in the government and massive waste and corruption to set in. As with most things you need a mix of both, a healthy amount capitalism to help with resource allocation and a reasonable amount of socialism/communism to prevent too much of the wealth from concentrating with any companies/individuals.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Socialism and Capitalism are ways of divvying up power and in that sense socialism is always a subset of capitalism because, as you point out, the natural tendency of power is for it to be accumulated and concentrated. With socialism there's always one player in town. Worse, the government IS the player and will always protect itself first. Under Capitalism there are many players (so long as there's not a monopoly) and government can play the proper regulatory role while other players can always try to compete against the giants.
Capitalism is far more preferable.

Re:Too late

[HornWumpus]

Bullshit. Not what Marx predicted. Marx said capitalism would die due to zero profit margins. He was wrong in just about every prediction.

There isn't capitalism, at all, in industries like banking.

What we have in our non-capitalist system elements is closer to Marx's solution than Smiths. Which is why it sucks so bad.

Re:Too late

[PopeRatzo]

Bullshit. Not what Marx predicted. Marx said capitalism would die due to zero profit margins. He was wrong in just about every prediction.

I don't know where you're pulling that from, but there are five specific areas in which Mark perfectly predicted the current late-stage capitalist cancer.

1) Imaginary appetites (see, iPhone X and just about every advertisement)

2) Capitalism's Chaotic Nature (see: the Great Recession of 2008 and the increasing economic inequality and resulting social disruption. It's called the "shock doctrine" or "disaster capitalism". For late-stage capitalism to work, the population has to be kept in a state of constant upheaval, apprehension and fear.)

3) Monopoly (see: what every company strives for)

4) The Globalization of Capitalism (see: Wars vs socialism. Capitalism requires ever-growing markets, and those markets will be obtained at any cost, including wars and invasions)

5) The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor (see: the "service" economy. The current levels of underemployment and stagnant wages are required by capitalists. As we saw from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan's inauguration, a prosperous middle- and working-class gains political power and spreads power (women's rights, civil rights, etc). Capitalism cannot survive powerful middle and working classes, so Ronald Reagan declared war on them, using "supply-side" economics as a weapon.

There isn't capitalism, at all, in industries like banking.

What we have in our non-capitalist system elements is closer to Marx's solution than Smiths. Which is why it sucks so bad..

Which is exactly what Marx predicted would happen. You're making his case.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

My god man - those aren't predictions they were already well entrenched even in Marx' day

1> Imaginary appetites have always existed. It's called status and that's why the nobleman (long before Marx was a wet dream in his father's eyes) chased after fashion or gold or jewels.

2> There had already been several economic crashes long before Marx put pen to paper. The problem isn't endemic to capitalism but to human nature in general. That's why the Soviet Union (and now Venezuela) had to lie, steal and murder to keep the balance and the illusion that a planned economy works. Planned economies never do.

3> Monopoly (see what every socialist government is)

4> Again, this is not endemic to capitalism but a problem with resource management as a whole. So why did the Soviet Union (and now China) expand their nations and reach? Because they needed the resources and power to continue to fund THEIR ever growing populace and appetites or to at least maintain it as their production values fell (Again, see Venezuela which also tried to expand before collapsing in on itself)

5> That's called more people than jobs. Again, see the soviet union and now Venezuela which has plenty of people but no way for them to contribute back to their planned economy. I'm sure you'll blame the US for that though.

Marx predicted shit. Just like any comment you make.

Re: /surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is not that big. And plenty of competition in the form of pc and android

What about Microsoft?

[Locke2005]

I've argued in the past that Microsoft would be worth more as separate companies. At least separate the OS company from the Apps company, so they are free to make competitive apps on Linux and Mac. (Yes, they already port Office to Mac). As for as XBox, the convergence between Windows and XBox is probably a good thing; I look forward to Windows PCs and XBox consoles becoming indistinguishable, and to being able to play XBox games wieh a gaming mouse and keyboard.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to Windows PCs and XBox consoles becoming indistinguishable, and to being able to play XBox games wieh a gaming mouse and keyboard.

You mean you look forward to remaining a member of the master race and owning the unwashed masses, don't you?

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The only reason you weren't able to play XBox with a gaming mouse and keyboard from the very first XBox was the competitive advantage it gives in multiplayer games. (In fact, IIRC, some RTS games on the XBox allowed a keyboard/mouse until MS didn't want people reminded about it.) The "controller in hand" crowd is worth too much to make them compete against mouse/keyboard.

Why the focus on tech giants?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for breaking up corporations, but why the focus on tech giants? There are plenty of banks, venture funds, communications, defense, etc companies that need divvying up as well.

Teddy's time and our time.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Trust buster Teddy Roosevelt cracked down on American monopolies when it was difficult for foreign companies to break into American markets.

Now we are in a totally different era. It is extremely difficult for any foreigner is just move in and live in the USA, legally. Even illegally one risks life, limb and liberty to move in here.

On the other hand, any Tom, Dick or Harry, of Ching Ling or Ramanathan Murugappa or Aziz al-Burkati or Omonomo Boborossa can set up a company and do business in America. We break up our monopolies, we still be under monopolies, except this time the monopolies are based in foreign countries.

They are the only ones who can keep foreign monopolies at bay. We should find ways to tame them, contain them but not cripple them so much foreign companies come and take our market.

Re:Teddy's time and our time.

[edtice1559]

It doesn't seem like you are really objecting to "foreign monopolies" but really any foreign company doing business here at all. That seems reasonable at first until you realize that there really is no such thing as a foreign company anymore. What makes them foreign? Their shares are listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange even if 80% of the stock holders are in the US? What about if they are listed on NYSE but have mostly foreign ownership?

Re:Teddy's time and our time.

[Eldaar]

I see a 2-part solution.

1) Gradually raise tariffs over a period of many years on goods imported from other countries. Tariffs would be determined based on something like minimum or median wage in the country of origin, where tariffs are greater on low-wage countries and lower on medium or high-wage countries.

This will help encourage domestic production of goods, helping our economy by keeping jobs and profits here.

2) Just like Teddy Roosevelt did, actually enforce our antitrust laws. As best I can tell, we don't need to write new antitrust laws - just enforce the ones already on the books which aren't being enforced as they should. The whole point of antitrust laws is to promote competition by breaking up companies that stifle it. There are many industries which have players that are far too large for their to be a competitive market, but banking is the first place to start. It's possible some technology companies like Amazon or Google could be broken up as they are likely bad for competition in some of the markets in which they compete.

Re:Teddy's time and our time.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You right about Sherman Act. Used correctly it can send CEOs to jail. It did.

Re:Teddy's time and our time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Racist much? You racist so much, you win all the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd trophies. You racist faster than Dale Earnhardt or Mario Andretti. You racist soooo fast that Formula 1 won't let you drive.

Racists gonna race.

Exposed to outside opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a typical bat-shit crazy and paranoid American who regards the outside world as the enemy; hundreds of millions were exposed to opinions not agreeing with the American status quo.

The sooner the EU and Asia can boot America out and onto the pavement where we have no need for them whatsoever, the better.

Nothing can save capitalism.

[GameboyRMH]

Automation, post-scarcity effects, and a finite world put a hard limit on its lifespan as a system that could hope to serve a majority of humanity.

Re: You were too poor for college

[anegg]

I don't find the definition of "moran" in the dictionary. Perhaps you meant "morons"? Ah, the irony.

Why these?

[bickerdyke]

I agree that almost-monopolies are not good because of reasons, but why these?

I think it's much worse that one single company is controlling half of the worlds beer market or that companies like Nestle have the food market cornered. And even if we restrict us to tech companies: Has the Microspft OS monopoly changed since everyone was concerned about that?

Re:Why these?

[upl8n87447]

Because these particular companies have climbed faster and further than any other company in any other industry ever? Sure, there are problematic companies in other industries as well, but these particular companies are leading to serious problems in competition and innovation, and are leading to a massive upwards transference of wealth in our economy/society.

I like to pick on Zuckerberg. The man, one man, made about $30 billion in less than 10 years. That alone was a big warning sign that we had a serious imbalance in a market where there was a lot of demand for this type of product, but no real competition. Adding to the issue, the network itself became very difficult for any competition to exist at all; a single user can't just up and leave if that's the network that their entire social network uses. A person who joins another network can't communicate with someone through the facebook network and vice versa. Facebook pushed to lock-in the user bases of competitive software, capitalizing on the inability for people to switch to competing platforms as the network grew. People bring up Myspace as a counterpoint of competition, but Myspace was very flawed and came in the beginning of the social network craze. Now that Facebook has had years to grow out its software, it's just about impossible for any company to make headways into competing.

Making matters worse is *how* Facebook makes money. It isn't the GUI that makes money, or the software itself. The software is comparable to a newspaper, but a blank newspaper isn't in demand. It's when you put words and pictures on the paper. Facebook made its money by capitalizing on the work of millions of users posting their content on the site. Without this content, no one would ever go on the site to read the ads. On top of this, the experience is clearly addicting. Being that they're monopolizing the industry, the content producers don't have a leg to stand on in negotiations with Facebook. I used to post all the time and my social group spent time on facebook reading my content... but I never got paid. I read friends' content, but they never got paid.

In effect, it's a newspaper, where the journalists don't get paid, there are far more advertisements served on the pages, and the newspaper company that prints the words and distributes them makes all the money. Except print and distributing the words is much much much cheaper... but the ads pay the same if not more...

Re:Why these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they are Democratic companies in Democratic states. That should have been obvious just from the headline.

Re:Why these?

[bickerdyke]

That is a good point why facebook is dangerouis. But again, that does not explain how this is more evil than taking away the water from people and selling it back at them: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...

Or making money by using IP laws to put people into slavery like dependency: https://www.globalresearch.ca/...

Compared to that, facebook and Google are blips on the radar.

How do you break up Facebook?

[quantaman]

Apple, Google, and Amazon all have multiple products and divisions that can easily be broken off and split into separate entities.

But Facebook is still just Facebook, you can't break it up without major changes to the product itself.

Re:How do you break up Facebook?

[Dixie_Flatline]

You can break up all of those companies, but virtually none in any way that's meaningful.

Break Google search off from Alphabet, and you're left with a giant search company that still makes money hand over fist, and a bunch of stuff that can't be funded.

Break Amazon up so that you have the Internet's online store, and a cloud service that definitely makes money, but doesn't impact the dominance of EITHER.

Break up Apple so that you've got an OS Apple and a Hardware Apple and now you have a significantly diminished shadow of both—the only reason Apple's products work well at all is because the hardware and software is considered in unison. This is an actively consumer-hostile decision. You COULD split off Apple's services from the rest of the system, I guess. That would probably actually make things a lot better, but it wouldn't impact the market in any meaningful way. (I'm also not convinced doing anything to Apple would positively impact the market in any way. They make the most money and have influence because of that, but remove them from the picture and a lot of the problems we started with haven't gone away. I'm really not sure why Apple is included in this list at all, tbh.)

Lastly, you can't really break up Facebook, but you could compel them to give ownership of people's social graphs back to them, since that's where all the value is. It's the connections, and connections of connections that are truly meaningful, and Facebook is the biggest and best in the social network space because they've got the most complete social graph, and they have that because they're the most popular. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. If what you want to do is break that, you could create a Facebook-esque utility that manages your social data, and Facebook or Twitter or whoever just sits on top of that.

Re:How do you break up Facebook?

[jdschulteis]

But Facebook is still just Facebook, you can't break it up without major changes to the product itself.

The changes wouldn't necessarily be visible to the user. You could break it up, and some of your friends would now be on FB2, or FB8 "the Ocho", but you'd still get notifications and be able to like or comment on each other's posts. Behind the scenes, there would be peering arrangements, analogous to the way the Internet backbone works.

It would then become possible to start a competing social network, because the network effect wouldn't accrue to just Facebook "Prime". For example, a subscription-based one with no ads, that gives users fine-grained control over what they shared with whom. I wonder how many would be willing to pay, and how much.

Re:How do you break up Facebook?

[quantaman]

You can break up all of those companies, but virtually none in any way that's meaningful.

Break Google search off from Alphabet, and you're left with a giant search company that still makes money hand over fist, and a bunch of stuff that can't be funded.

Partially, though I suspect Youtube and Maps could still be profitable.

The biggest concern I have there is things like DeepMinds, which is legitimate R&D, needs someone with deep pockets that can avoid monetizing for a few years (or you fold that kind of research back into academia).

Break Amazon up so that you have the Internet's online store, and a cloud service that definitely makes money, but doesn't impact the dominance of EITHER.

And Kindle, and all the secret brands that Amazon owns and has sell stuff on Amazon.com. I think Amazon is one of the better candidates for a breakup since they're arguably abusing their monopoly power already.

Break up Apple so that you've got an OS Apple and a Hardware Apple and now you have a significantly diminished shadow of both—the only reason Apple's products work well at all is because the hardware and software is considered in unison.

Easier to break up than FB, but I agree it harms consumers.

I do think Apple could be subject to more regulation than it is now as they have seemed to abuse their control of the platform.

Lastly, you can't really break up Facebook, but you could compel them to give ownership of people's social graphs back to them, since that's where all the value is. It's the connections, and connections of connections that are truly meaningful, and Facebook is the biggest and best in the social network space because they've got the most complete social graph, and they have that because they're the most popular. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. If what you want to do is break that, you could create a Facebook-esque utility that manages your social data, and Facebook or Twitter or whoever just sits on top of that.

Yeah, the trouble is you're not legislating their technical infrastructure. Plus you're making an even bigger privacy issue with this blob of data all sorts of parties can access.

Do you like, LITERALLY hate him?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, really? It begs the question.

Wrong idea

[slashname3]

So because these companies are so large they allow fake news to control the population?

Where is the data that shows the fake news actually impacted anything?

This idea that a bunch of trolls can target a population and sway their ideas assumes people are really dumb animals.

Are we not better than that? Can we not think for ourselves? Or have we dumbed down our schools and failed to teach critical thinking to the masses?

If that is the case we are lost already and breaking up corporations because they are successful will not solve the problem.

Re:Wrong idea

[Antique Geekmeister]

> This idea that a bunch of trolls can target a population and sway their ideas assumes people are really dumb animals.

It suggests that they are social creatures, and that ideas evolve much as biology evolves. It is also consistent with deceit, confusion, and imperfect information are built into every layer of social interaction, and many layers of physical and sensory interaction. "Trolls", scoundrels, and frauds have been part of human behavior and politics at every social level since group dynamics existed even in quite simple animals. Even intelligent, clever creatures can be and are fooled on a frequent basis. I suggest that fraud is unavoidable in complex social systems.

The _reaction_ to and exposure of fraud is also part of the social system. But let us not be surprised that fraud exists.

Re: /surprise

[lgw]

Apple is not that big. And plenty of competition in the form of pc and android

Third largest company in America by revenue, ninth largest in the world.

GDP Market Cap

[Lije Baley]

"they've aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation's GDP"
- This seems like either a misplaced apostrophe or a math fail. US GDP is something like 4 times their combined market caps.

Re:/surprise

[lgw]

Sure, but Walmart has 3 times the revenue of Amazon (and that includes AWS in Amazon), so I don't think that's what he was on about.

Re:/surprise

[cyberchondriac]

He's basically parroting George Soros. Now it makes sense.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news...

How old is this guy? I vote 15, maybe?

[theendlessnow]

Let's break up the jumbo eternal company... you know companies like Amazon, because they were never a startup.

Sheesh... professor of what?

The fact that those big companies didn't exist and now exist prove the "professor" wrong. He's wrong about what he said, and I don't think he understands capitalism at all. What is he teaching???

gods? Really? Amazed. People will ditch these "gods" (I even hate to use his word here) for new "gods", they always do... oddly enough, that's closer to capitalism, which I"m just going to say it, clearly he's against it.

Just invoke the 13th amendment

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations are people, right? So then why can they own other corporations?

Stop fixing symptoms!

[duke_cheetah2003]

This is completely silly. How many times do we need to stand at this point of history? Haven't we been here before? Several times?

Stop trying to address the symptoms of our broken system, and fix the system itself so this stops being a problem we face again and again.

If you want monopolies to not be a thing, then you need to change a lot more than just busting up monopolies as they inevitably pop up again and again.

This is reaching into the insanity regions of stupid. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Doesn't happen. Learn from the past, stop repeating it.

Re:/surprise

[MountainLogic]

On the surface, say Apple looks like a tightly focused widget (phones, tables & computer) company, but look a little deeper and you see them using their monopoly positions to capture new markets much like Microsoft did with the browser business before they were forced to open up the desktop. In Apple's case their music business is tightly integrated into their product as is their back-up storage business. Apples does not provide an API so that others can provide music for their music player and ios does not have an API to allow you to select any cloud storage company. These interfaces would be easy to write. Just look at their mail client. They are abusing their dominant position on the phone to force/coerce you into paying to use their ancillary services. DOn't think me an APple hater as I am writing this on a Mac and have an iPhone in my pocket. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, etc are just as guilty of abusing their monopolistic positions and will also need to have their hands slapped or have the whole company dismembered from time to time. Don't worry they will keep growing and be able to abuse their position again. Creating unfair sustainable advantages is what most MBAs seem to do. Capitalism will survive a little adult supervision.

What about banks and wall street?

[wardrich86]

Pretty sure banks and Wallstreet are causing more damage than the companies listed in TFA,

US isn't actually capitalist

[fluffernutter]

Capitalism was never meant to be a vehicle for companies to become this big and powerful. Government intervention does that. Capitalism actually requires companies to find it too hard to continue and break up before they get that big. Of course this doesn't work for any corporate board member or executive, so they get all the protection they ask for.

Re: /surprise

[fluffernutter]

They have more money than the UK, Canada, and Ireland all together, sitting in a BANK ACCOUNT. A company that can do that is big enough already and feels no need to grow.

'Simple' rules for a healthy economy and society

[Baron_Yam]

Determine what a safe market share is, set an exponential growth in corporate tax by percentage over that share.

Determine which goods and services are best considered 'infrastructure' where competition is counter-productive, and have the government take them over - ideally while farming out the actual work to contractors in accordance with the first rule.

Now look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc... how do you break up such things when the whole point of them is that they provide a single interface? Consider search and social media (over a certain market share) to be infrastructure, nationalize it, and have a government central interface that combines regional providers. And deal with the idea that instead of a corporation deciding what is acceptable to do with your personal information, you now have a government making those decisions.

I'd argue that chopping companies up will reduce their influence on government, and remind the government that their 'shareholders' are voting citizens, and that ultimately so long as you don't elect a tyrant you'll be better off.

A Fortiori ...

[tabdelgawad]

Let's break up China and the US too.

Ridiculous.

Re:/surprise

[stabiesoft]

Good answer, government's role in slapping a monopoly is exactly what you point out, using your current dominant position (IE profit engine) to subsidize wiping out companies in another area and then taking over that area. And as you point out, they often grow back. AT&T is almost back to where it was before it was split into 7. Basically back to 2.

Re:/surprise

[lgw]

Most phones are not Apple phones - so not only are they not leveraging a monopoly here, they're not even leveraging a dominant market position. Amazon doesn't have a dominant position in retail (Walmart is much large), MS wasn't on his list, but most computers run Android, not Windows. Facebook I can see, but their near-monopoly is the result of consumer choice - would you remove consumer choice? In the name of what?

People were aghast when this was proposed for Micr

[Tangential]

There was huge oppostion to doing this to Microsoft 20 years ago and not doing it didnâ(TM)t work out well for the public interest or Microsoft. I suspect that similar results will happen with these companies. Theyâ(TM)ll collapse from the inside, much like Microsoft did from a combination of no vision and no hubris.

Start with Congress

[wirelessjb]

The debate about breaking up large companies is compelling and important to have, but start by taking away their power over congress so that any remedies that are reached can have teeth. That's Lawrence Lessig's "Lesterland" argument, which I was recently introduced to, and have bought into.

Re: /surprise

[akical0118]

Good catch

Re: /surprise

[D.McG.]

So, they banked a lot of money. That does NOT mean that a breakup is warranted. A vast majority of that money was earned selling just one product, the iPhone. Imagine that the iPhone was their only product. How, King Solomon, do you intend to split that baby? If Apple was split, there would still be a sub-company with the iPhone making billions. Splitting Apple has no merit. They make just a few different devices that all work together by running the same software.

I also don't see how splitting Facebook (a social network, of which there are many) is beneficial to anyone. Don't like them? Great! Go to a different website. There's no monopoly here either. They are not stopping anybody from competing on the open net.

Re:/surprise

[MountainLogic]

What the EU/US-Justice did to microsoft's browser business very effective broke a monopoly on browsers and allowed chrome/Firefox a way forward. But when you have companies that are monopolies/dominant in multiple business segments using their strength to lock competitors out of a market then no you are not limiting choice. You are creating a level playing field that fosters many choices through fair competition.

If the cable/teleco companies keep consolidating and strangling access to the internet how long do you think you will have any choice on what product you can buy? I'm old enough to remember Ma Bell and having no choice who I got my phone from.

Why yes, Rick . . .

[sgt_doom]

Yes, Rick, you are right. Would you please check out the pod for me?

Booksellers dreamâ¦

[ElitistWhiner]

Best goddamn book review platform (/.) for an author - everrrr.
Nothing more, keep moving.

Not a shift

[Anonymous Coward]

A great many people have felt this way for a great many years, it's just finally entering mainstream consciousness. How quickly we forget that the same measures were necessary with the tech giants of the 90s. This is nothing new. Forget capitalism, it's beginning to be about simple personal freedom, and that is not a good thing, not at all. These companies have practically begged to be regulated with their behavior, and anywhere other than the U.S., they already would have been by now.

Re: /surprise

[lgw]

I never suggested a breakup was warranted. But AC's claim that "Apple is not that big" is wrong. Apple is quite large.

Re:/surprise

[lgw]

But what does any of that have to do with the companies named, in this decade? None of those companies looks like it's leveraging market dominance for shady ends, except maybe Google in putting it's own products first in search results (allegedly - though I believe it).

Amazon "powers fake news?"

[Anonymous Coward]

“They basically power fake news

Did anyone who read the whole thing understand how Amazon (and Apple) "power fake news"? Maybe I'm dumb but I failed to follow it.

Breaking up is never easy to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has been ordered to break up - it already consists of dissimilbar divisions - it seems to be making strong hardware seles these days and it's a big Azure Cloud provider.

Consider breaking up Apple. You get Apple Records, a music publishing company (iTunes), Apple Computer (sells notebooks, desktops and tablets), Apple phone (sells iPhone and iPod) and Apple Software (selling OS/X, Swift language and dev tools, Claris Works).

Now break up Google and you get a company that runs a search engine and webmail, a company that sells data and advertising, and Google Labs, which invents zany things, and Google Software (Android and Chrome).

Try to split up Amazon and you get a division that does e-commerce and a company that rents out cloud servers.

Splitting up Facebook would result in a company that does social media and a company that sells users private data.

How practical would it be? Or maybe I am all wrong and you end up with a daughter company for each U.S. state.

Where are Intel, IBM, and AT&T in this list?

Re: You were too poor for college

[Anonymous Coward]

I susoact a 'woosh' is deserved here. 'Moran' seems to be a bit of a trope around here. Just like the words liek, haz, etc on the wider internet.

Nah

[Anonymous Coward]

?

Professor of what? Retardation?

Apple has competitors. They are the UNDERDOG in their industry. Microsoft destorys them in desktop OS both consumer and business. Samsung devices outsell their phones singlehandedly, before you factor in Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Motorola, Asus, Microsoft etc, and those all also outsell iPad.

Google has competitors. Facebook has competitors. Facebook's business is selling information, anyway. Google doesn't really have a lot of actual products for people, that cost money. Their money also comes from services to businesses.

The only half legitimate concern here is Amazon and even though Amazon offers great services and free shipping, people are still going to go to a retail store as long as the Fuck This Shit zone lies far enough away from the Comfort Zone on a graph. They are BY NO MEANS always the only or best place to buy something. Especially electronics or food or toiletries or appliances or car parts etc.

How old is this guy and where was he in 1990-2010

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's a Microsoft .Net developer or worst, Microsoft Visual Basic developer..

Airports are natural monopolies

[rsilvergun]

_Airlines_ are not. We've let the major airlines buy out their competitors left and right, leading to a lot less competition. But that wasn't natural. There was a lot of incompetence on the part of several airlines (bad fuel contracts come to mind) and a few went tits up. Normally you'd see some new competitors in the wake of those shake ups, but we've stopped enforcing anti-trust laws making it far too risky. If we'd crack down on anti-competitive pricing you'd see some new airlines, but fat chance of that.

Sorry, I like free stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe all the money they have accumulated will be put to good use?
I trust Amazon's vision more than I do Goldman Sachs, or the military.

A company of heroes?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The government cannot break up a company because it doesn't like their message or news. That violates the 1st Amendment.

It is certainly of interest to investigate the industrial scale government-sponsored astroturfing of lies, and to try to call it out and even stop said governments. But you cannot punish a company (or any person or group of people) for struggling with this.

Re:A company of heroes?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> The government cannot break up a company because it doesn't like their message or news. That violates the 1st Amendment.

A government can try and it's occurred repeatedly. Please look into the history of the Washington Post publication of the Pentagon Papers, the publication of previously restricted details of thermonuclear weapons technolgies by Progressive, Inc., and the current bans on advertising cigarettes. "Doesn't like their message or news" is a very broad category: a government may not like the message because it is fraudulent, or treasonous, and many governments restrict such messages.

Oil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Break up the energy and oil companies. Also, breakup Microsoft.

Re: /surprise

[jeremyp]

When you say "more money" what do you mean? No self respecting country in the World has a positive bank balance. On that basis, I've got more money than the UK, Ireland and Canada. In fact I've got a lot more money than the USA.

If you are talking about annual revenue, the UK government by itself has over £700 billion and the GDP is over £2 trillion. Apple's revenue is less than $300 billion.

Re:/surprise

[jeremyp]

Apple does not have a monopoly in anything.

It's all hypothetical

[Anonymous Coward]

The article and a good number of comments are all hypothetical, based on 'this is what we should do' opinions, and ignoring the reality of state of our society at this time. I'd much rather read about practical solutions that counter Prez Shithole, our bought and paid-for Congress, and our increasingly corruptible, politically motivated judicial branch. ... and no for the snarky trollers, no I can't make any of my own as I'm completely clueless as to why things are as screwed up as they are now.

all the barnacles in Byzantium

[epine]

I think you'll find that your approach will produce legal chicanery the likes of which you have never before imagined.

To a certain degree, this doesn't matter. Especially where banks are concerned, because each corporation, no matter how byzantine, files for bankruptcy independently.

It such a world, when the stock market tanks, and the wizards of Wall St say "we the profits coming, but the losses caught us off guard, help Obi Wan Greenspan, you're our only hope" we can sit back and let the micro-container corporations die on the vine one by one, until enough blood is let to finally get the f-f-f-financial message across that profits and losses are joined at the hips.

This is a simple property of corporations as legal failure boundaries. All the barnacles in Byzantium don't change that one, simple, elementary, essential, free-market fact.

Bankruptcy law makes capitalism fundamentally anti-symmetric (failure has a fixed absorbing boundary, but success does not). The power of mitigating this enormous systemic artefact, even in relatively small ways, should not be flipped the bird.

these blogs are being paid off

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a conspiracy to advance more and more negative coverage of american technology companies. You just see the same group of sites writing the same thing day-in and day-out, and slowly ratcheting things up.

Re: /surprise

[fluffernutter]

By money I mean the size of the entire economy.

NYU professors for KKKapitali$m?

[mi]

Breaking Up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook Could Save Capitalism, NYU Professor Says

Though I've met a few, I'm yet to encounter — or even hear about a professor, especially in New York, who would sincerely wish to "save Capitalism".

Most of the academics work for the government — either directly or via government-provided grants — and thus inevitably lean Left.

I strongly doubt, this professor's concern for Capitalism's well-being is genuine — especially, since he proposes authoritarian methods to "fix" it.

Re:People were aghast when this was proposed for M

[Anonymous Coward]

There was huge oppostion to doing this to Microsoft 20 years ago and not doing it didn't work out well for the public interest or Microsoft. I suspect that similar results will happen with these companies.

Yes, unfortunately we even get economists arguing against this sort of thing, and they should know better. For example, Thomas Dilorenzo (in his book "How Capitalism Saved America") discusses this issue in a way very favourable to Microsoft - a conclusion he can only reach because he doesn't see the errors and inconsistencies in his own logic. He cites the Liebowitz and Margolis study to defend Microsoft - but fails to understand that the results of that study are irrelevant and immaterial, because he doesn't understand the computer technology concept of an operating system (revealing an appalling level of ignorance in this day and age). It simply doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft is competing in a legitimate manner in other software markets: that has nothing to do with their control of the desktop operating system market.

Worse, he contradicts himself by coming out in favour of the US government's action against the air traffic control strike (under Reagan in 1982) - a position that is completely inconsistent with his position regarding Microsoft. Microsoft was not competing in a classical market with large numbers of suppliers. Instead they had dominance based on monopolies granted by government, artificial constraints on competition in the form of copyright and patent - and those monopolies greatly increased the cost to the public of all computer services (and everything dependant upon computer services - almost everything that matters in the entire economy).

To make matters worse, they used their monopolies to gain an unfair advantage in competition. Imagine if the air traffic controllers also controlled the interstate highway system, and decided to go into the trucking business - but allowed only the trucks they owned to go over 20 MPH. Absurd - but that's effectively what Microsoft did, shielded from genuine competition by US law.

There is nothing in the US Constitution that requires the current implementations of copyright and patent. Some such system is authorized - yes - subject to the Bill of Rights, including the 9th and 10th Amendments (which make the Bill of Rights open-ended) - but the current system has many aspects that go far beyond the text of the Constitution (and do in fact infringe the Bill of Rights). The form patent and copyright take in US law is largely a reflection of corruption in government, and massive, deeply entrenched problems with legal ethics and hence a violation of the 9th Amendment rights to ethical government, and ethical practice of law - a point that has been discussed at length on this forum in the past.

In short, this is not legitimate capitalism. It is a distortion of capitalism that does not serve the interests of society. It is exactly the kind of thing Adam Smith warned us against in 1776 - but we still haven't learned the lesson.

The cost of almost all goods and services in the economy are higher as a result of the monopolies government has granted Microsoft. This increased cost is effectively a regressive tax, which harms the poor but doesn't really bother the rich.

The dominance of Microsoft over the computer business was the computer equivalent to control over not just the air traffic system, but also the majority of the railways, waterways, ports, the interstate highway system, and the secondary roads.

If it was appropriate for the government to act towards the public interest in the case of the strike by the air traffic controllers, clearly it was even more appropriate to act in the case of Microsoft.

The strong bias Dilorenzo reveals in his book against software professionals seems to have acted to prevent him from getting the basic technical information he needed to avoid a foolish and embarrassing error - a failure of basic research skills. Unfortunately, many ignorant people will doubtless read his book and come to the same erroneous conclusions - a problem compounded by the fact that a lot of his points on other topics are good ones.

The way to save it

[ebvwfbw]

is to actually teach it. It's the best form of government the world has ever seen and the most successful. Way better than socialism where we redistribute the hard work of people to people who don't want to work. In this system ANYONE can go from not a dime to being one of the richest people in the world. I can remember when I didn't have a dime to my name. Today it only is getting better and better. I'll probably break a million in a year this year thanks to Trump being in office.

We need to fix this country big time. Get rid of the crazy leftists in the Universities and schools. The ones that think they're entitled and teach kids to be offended over nothing. We should bring bullies back. They served a vital role in the world. Say something stupid, they'd correct you. Without that we're seeing stupid shit in the streets.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean to say that global monopolies run by greedy sociopaths are bad for society?

Who knew?

Re:/surprise

[Veretax]

I feel similarly, but about Google and Amazon.

(that is if I was going to consider this line of thought at all)

Google has its hands in a lot of things that don't seem related, Search Engines, Docs, the Cloud, Email, etc. Amazon was a Retail company that built a great back bone and now their Cloud offerings are what others run on, but if you are a retailer who might compete with Amazon, there is clearly risk there. Facebook is just one social platform, it does have a lot of power, to control what gets said in its walls, but I'm not sure how you'd break up facebook at all. Where as many of Google's services could be spun off into separate companies (and may already be doing that ot some degree - Android OS/Pixel biz, search engine and ads biz) FB is hard to see boundaries within. I don't see what's wrong with Apple though. Their business makes sense to stay together, between Phones/Tablets/Computers all are general computing devices at this point. Now yeah the apple store is a little weird, but as long as the internet exists there are other ways to get software on your iOS device I think.

Save Capitalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the world would be better if it died a death...