Big Companies Are Starting to Swallow the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/business/big-companies-are-starting-to-swallow-the-world.html

by yarapavan • 6 years ago

81 20 6 years ago

pjkundert3• 6 years ago

The destruction of small businesses by the crushing burden of regulatory and taxation compliance is virtually complete.

Small businesses pay 10x to 100x more for compliance per dollar of gross revenue than their multinational rivals — for laws written by their armies of lobbyists, successfully architected to extinguish their more nimble and inventive small-business competitors.

I’m morbidity interested in how people will enjoy the world they’re creating for themselves...

seibelj• 6 years ago

The ultimate solution is decentralized technologies that cannot be shutdown, because creating a centralized technology (website, app, product) will open you up to endless enforcement actions. It will take a long time but the people desire freedom, so over the longterm freedom will win out over coercion.

pjkundert3• 6 years ago

Projects like holo.host are almost ready for production deployment (months, not years), and hold the promise of helping with this transition.

Fully decentralized and distributed Holochain apps don’t even depend on DNS, so are even more resilient against freedom-hostile centralization.

Yes - exciting times are coming!

sascha_sl• 6 years ago

Very few goods are purely digital, and for everything else you can still legislate participation in a system. You saw this happen on the internet, you'll see it happen in other distributed systems.

You can't build an ancap dream non-state on top of an actual state.

This is the same problem with blockchains finding actual use-cases. Tamper-proof decentralized structures are useless if they're not enforced, and if you need enforcement you likely have a much more nimble solution in place already that is good enough in the few properties blockchains excel in.

dTal• 6 years ago

That's all very well for "apps" etc. The vast majority of small businesses provide goods and services. You can't decentralize a grocery store, a restaurant, a factory.

All the world isn't HN.

White_Wolf• 6 years ago

Are starting ? Just take a look at Nestle,Google, Amazon, Aliexpress and such or media conglomerates owned by one person/company. It's already half way there.

A small manufacturer can't exactly compete when all regulatory decisions are more or less pushed/written by big companies and the government creates regulatory leeches that charge you an arm and a leg for nothing.

throwawaysea4• 6 years ago

This headline is comical since we are well past “starting”. We had immense diversified conglomerates even before big tech, and they were already problematic. With Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple coming of age, the only new development is that the failure of antitrust enforcement in America (and elsewhere) is far more obvious and pervasive than even cynics imagined. With limitless capital, regulatory capture, massive patent war chests, and the ability to starve would-be competitors of talent (by spending a lot temporarily), the world is the mega corp’s oyster.

A society which limits the growth of mega corps will automatically see numerous benefits like redistribution of wealth and power, redundancy/resilience in the economy, decentralization away from mega cities, an increased diversity of cultures, localized circular economics, and more. I think this is something both sides of the aisle (in America) could and should support, since it achieves some of the goals of directly redistributive policies but with the market as the mechanism, rewarding hard work/success.

Outside of the US, other countries shouldn’t tolerate their customer bases being pillaged by international mega corps. It is a threat to their sovereignty, cultural independence, and limits innovation that could come from all those locations. We are super late on acting. Globally, we all should demand change from our politicians ASAP on this issue.

coldtea3• 6 years ago

With Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple coming of age

Of them, the only one that is not actually threatening is Apple.

I mean Apple controls many people's living (iOS developers), but ultimately everybody could just stop using Apple products tomorrow and no great harm would be done. They'd get a PC and an Android phone, and at worst lose some apps they've purchased. Apple is just a "luxury gadgets" company. You can do fine without an Apple phone/laptop/software.

Whereas Google controls web ranking and digital advertising, Amazon owns a large part of retail, books, IaaS, and so on.. those are huge powers over markets and individuals...

throwawaysea4• 6 years ago

Apple is perhaps the largest vertically integrated company. That hurts innovation outside of their walled garden. And they do some anti competitive things - for example keeping iMessage exclusive to their platform. And Apple does have their own Maps product. And soon, they will likely enter Search: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/27/apple-may-launch-...

What I will credit Apple with is prioritizing privacy. They can afford to given their hardware margins perhaps.

arvinsim• 6 years ago

How would you propose to do this when most of the megacorps are publicly owned by shareholders?

I think that's part of the problem. Perverse incentives.

altacc• 6 years ago

This is one of the effects I most fear from the pandemic induced recession. Large and delivery based companies will have the capacity to survive, whilst smaller companies don't. I see small companies & stores as proving some of the variety & creativity which drive innovation. Larger companies can be creative but often have uniformity in their approaches.

But I'm trying to be positive as some large companies are under pressure to adapt and in the recovery there may be new opportunities which smaller businesses are best placed to fill. At least until they're bought up by the big companies.

coldtea3• 6 years ago

The end game of the "free market" is corporatism.

That would be the case even without politicians doing favors and handling out monopolies, and asking for all kinds of BS regulation that only big manufacturers/companies can afford.

After a company gets large enough (because of competence) it's not easy anymore for lesser companies to compete with it.

That might have been the case back in Adam Smith's time, when it just took some ingenuity to come up with an idea, and the money to build a few factories, which were much simpler and 1/100+ the cost of today (inflation adjusted).

[That was true even back in "early web" days. It was much cheaper to make your own competitive search engine that it is to compete with Google today].

It might also have been easy when new paradigms were taking off, and old companies couldn't work with them (e.g. switch from mainframes to PC), living a spot open. Now big companies can diversify more easily, predict future trends (like Google adopted to a mobile world, and will adapt to VR or whatever comes next).

Now the technologies are more involved (even in "non tech" companies) and the stakes higher. Even if you can just design your advanced product and order units from a generic chinese manufacturer, you wont get the same economies of scale, preferential treatment, distribution, etc, as a large company.

And if some wanabbe company gets threatening enough, a bigger company can just buy it. Especially since going to the stock market as opposed to being self-owned means all companies are up for sale.

throwawaysea4• 6 years ago

For the market to function healthily there has to be “enough” viable competition and “low enough” barriers to entry and “high enough” barriers to crippling newcomers. We clearly don’t have that last piece today. A recent example is Microsoft building Teams and stealing Slack’s innovative ideas. Now they can deploy massive developer resources on it and take advantage of bundling alongside Office. What recourse does Slack have? Even if Slack had patents to protect their ideas, Microsoft probably has enough random frivolous patents and a large enough litigation team/budget that Slack can’t afford to fight. The idea of a “defensive” patent portfolio is laughable - the biggest companies use them to make small companies’ patents ineffective, not to defend themselves in some virtuous manner.

oautholaf• 6 years ago

Slack's innovative idea was to build IRC as a service. They knew MSFT was going to come after them years ago. Why weren't they more prepared? Why did investors believe this day would never come?

fgonzag• 6 years ago

MSFT was in the IM game decades before slack... MSN Messenger. So if anyone has patents on that front, it'd be Microsoft...

dewlinedew2• 6 years ago

Is there an ETF for corporate law firms?

Big Companies Are Starting to Swallow the World

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