Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/opinion/sunday/fascism-economy-monopoly.html

by arctux • 8 years ago

122 87 8 years ago

cardamomo• 8 years ago

The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.

epberry• 8 years ago

Agreed. FAANG has the government over a barrel.

porphyrogene• 8 years ago

For many the rise of fascism being fostered in and around San Francisco is an impossible contradiction.

jaggederest2• 8 years ago

As has been said about other enterprises:

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
- J Paul Getty

The government wants the data that they provide and the tax revenue their employees provide.

Nasrudith3• 8 years ago

FAANG is a curious one to bring up as a monopoly and yet it keeps on being repeated. They are large and influential certainly but they all have one thing in common - they are all accessible to anyone with an internet connection. They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less. It may be unhealthily difficult to break into but a monopoly it is not.

Compare to the carrier and media conglomerate monopolies which don't receive any rhetorical pushes against them as monopolies. Despite them literally being the only option in many localities - and not even tiny ones either.

neolefty• 8 years ago

Wow, it looks like — even proportionally — the most profitable companies have grown since 1955 (the earliest year I can find ranked lists for).

* 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy.

* 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy.

I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control?

[1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr...

[3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...

danielvf• 8 years ago

GM was selling cars mostly in the US, while more than 60% of Apple's sales happen outside the US. There's still quite difference, but a little smaller than the raw numbers.

adventured2• 8 years ago

Your comparison is drastically wrong. GM's profit in 1955 was a similar percentage vs US GDP, as what Apple is today.

US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000.

US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b).

[1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...

stickfigure5• 8 years ago

What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part?

This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.

kopo2• 8 years ago

Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.

bobthepanda• 8 years ago

We need to blow the gates open and mandate that

1) a person has the right to export their data and receive it in a usable format 2) a person has the right to use this exported data and give it to a competitor

There is no reason why switching between, say, Spotify, Google Play Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music should be any harder than switching a cell phone carrier. Imagine how much faster Myspace or Digg would've imploded if you could just export to a competitor with a click of a button.

mortenjorck2• 8 years ago

Which half of your social network goes to which part?

For starters, the part of my social network on Whatsapp can spin off to Whatsapp, and the part of my social network on Instagram can spin off to Instagram.

esotericn• 8 years ago

The obvious examples are Instagram and WhatsApp.

Over the years Facebook have acquired over fifty lesser known companies.

pllbnk• 8 years ago

The legislature doesn't have to come up with every minuscule detail because it is impossible to have a detailed plan which would make all sides happy. They only have to come up with a certain sane law and then let the companies figure out how to best execute to stay alive and well with the help of the free market. And that's the best thing about it - if there is a demand, the split companies will stay alive but their reduced size will also allow for the competition to come into the market. I don't worry a little bit that some destructive anti-monopoly government action would cause any high-demand market area to stay empty in the free market economy. And needless to say, it is also better for consumers.

darkerside• 8 years ago

This is utterly wishful thinking, but I wish we had a technically literate government that could help foster technical solutions, without necessarily building them.

Example: personal data format standards, making it simple to export your data from one platform to another,

Another example: regular vertical spread of data companies, so they can collect but not utilize, and you must be notified of anything sold about you (e.g. inclusion on an email list)

keiferski• 8 years ago

1. Facebook is vastly more than just their website. For starters, they own two of the other most popular messaging/social media entities: WhatsApp and Instagram.

2. There are plenty of antitrust laws on the books from the early 1900s.

profalseidol• 8 years ago

Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania.

What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.

olivermarks• 8 years ago

Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.

srtjstjsj• 8 years ago

"populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"

twblalock• 8 years ago

There's more to it than that. Populists normally portray a situation as a struggle between the people and the elites who control society.

rorykoehler• 8 years ago

I always understood populist as bowing to the lowest common denominator rather than taking an actual moral position. Ie not thinking through the consequences.

goldfeld5• 8 years ago

There may be something to your definition but populist is also plainly about the candidate who says whatever people want to hear, so yes it may overlap.

As for GP's point, it may be the case for Trump but not so much for the newest populist in Brazil, for instance, who's more or less a sellout to the US of A and giant platform companies as many a breed of politician here down south have ever been.

nabla9• 8 years ago

Populism does not mean popular.

It's unfortunate that populism has a name that leads to this misconception. People see the word and jump into discussion assuming that they know what is all about.

Populism is the claim that the people have a 'will'. There is no real disagreement of what the real people want or need for compromise. There are people who disagree but they are not the 'real people'. They are somehow compromised, the corrupt elite, misled or 'the others'. What 'people want' is already known, now you just need to vote populist into power to implement the will of the people. Laws and norms often make it difficult to implement this 'will' and they should be changed.

By contrast liberal[1] democracies are based on idea that the complex democratic process gradually produces something that people can live with. It's not exactly what anyone wants. There is no common agreement of what people want when people go and vote. The end result of working democracy is negotiated compromise. Laws and norms should be followed when this game of democracy is played.

---

[1]: liberal is another word that have different meanings in different contexts. Liberal does not mean leftist in this context.

loceng• 8 years ago

Many conversations/topics don't seem to get quite deep enough, I'm not sure how much is because of attention space/disinterest of people and/or popular news incentivized for reaction vs. education. E.g. Minimum wage increase conversations are moot if you don't address the underlying constant increase of rent by landlords for residential and commercial space, etc.

ineedasername5• 8 years ago

Populist, nationalist thinking, by definition seems pretty decent on its face. But most often it's defined by who is not part of the "many" or "common" that make up the populist base. And those that fall outside are villainized and dehumanized, and held up as scapegoats for all of society's ills. Take right now, where illegal imigrants, the media, and liberals as a whole are all painted with the "evil" brush by the populist sentiments. Not to say they're perfect or there aren't issues to be solved, but raising it above the level of disagreement to that of "they're evil and they want to destroy you" is damaging to the fabric of society.

chasd00• 8 years ago

Man, you want to be painted with the "evil" brush refuse to fall lock step in line with the west/east coast political groupthink. Even being suspected of not being a party member is a scary place to be.

mortenjorck2• 8 years ago

I read this sentence as Wu suggesting a hierarchy of increasing social risk:

with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world

The first, populism, is neutral; at its best it is the recognition of legitimate grievances, while at its worst it is the channeling of those grievances into tribalism.

The second, nationalism, is more fraught: It is where tribalism becomes codified, and allegiance takes the place of grievance.

The last, fascism, is the end-state, where tribalism enables violence against both those outside the tribe and those seen as a threat within it.

zaru27• 8 years ago

It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons.

As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.

yuhong2• 8 years ago

I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.

mtlevine0• 8 years ago

Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?

yuhong2• 8 years ago

I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.

trevyn3• 8 years ago

Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)

imgabe• 8 years ago

I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things.

Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?

fromMars• 8 years ago

Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc.

Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.

shmerl• 8 years ago

It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".

seibelj• 8 years ago

I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”, and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control.

Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.

ilaksh• 8 years ago

I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be.

If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems.

For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures.

Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency.

In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).

harigov• 8 years ago

I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).

masonic• 8 years ago

I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...

Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness'

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