> It is trying. Yahoo tried to acquire Google too, remember?
The success rate doesn't need to be 100% for my point to be valid.
WhatsApp and Instagram could very well have eaten Facebook's lunch. Now FB is being threatened for the first time by TikTok, why? Because they're a Chinese company and FB can't simply buy them due to Chinese regulations!
Also consider this: in an idealised, perfect free market, every company is just barely breaking even, because as soon as they're making a profit it means it's possible to undercut them. (Bezos: "Your margin is my opportunity").
The existence of massive liquidity in the hands of some companies is itself evidence of inefficiency.
> Not per se, but history shows that even the most entrenched monopolies are very prone to disruption. I don't see any non-banks in the Fortune 100 that are over a century old.
Poor evidence, since antitrust action was very strong in the USA for most of the 20th century.
> First we would have to agree on what "net negative" means, agree that our vision of what to do about it would improve the situation, and agree that we have a right to take such an intervention. Do you see where the problem is?
Yes, people can disagree on what their preferred society looks like. That's the fundamental problem of politics. But that disagreement can include the exact value of freedom.
I personally rate freedom very high, yet the restraint "if you manage to build a trillion-dollar company, you must not make it unnecessarily hard for others to develop better products than yours" sounds like a slam-dunk kind of sacrifice for the sake of a more efficient innovation-oriented market.
> The success rate doesn't need to be 100% for my point to be valid.
Yes it does. You were arguing that Apple can prevent competition from ever arising. This isn't the case, clearly.
Yes of course there is inefficiency, I never said there wasn't. It would take a long time and a lot of money to build a mobile device as capable as an iPhone. That amount of time/money basically dictates how Apple can behave in the marketplace. If Apple triples its prices, for instance, competitors will become much more appealing both to users and investors.
All of this profit is Apple's return on the initial investment of developing the iPhone and App Store. This was an existentially risky thing for them to do, and we should not hinder the profits brought about by its success, lest we discourage others from attempting the same.
It's not at all clear that these regulations will create a more innovation-oriented market. It could well be that they will hinder innovation. Do you have any ideas on how we can tell for sure? I think we should be pretty confident before using regulation, don't you?
> Yes it does. You were arguing that Apple can prevent competition from ever arising. This isn't the case, clearly.
Ok, fine, it can only reduce the effectiveness of competition by a large amount. See the last point in this reply.
> All of this profit is Apple's return on the initial investment of developing the iPhone and App Store. This was an existentially risky thing for them to do, and we should not hinder the profits brought about by its success, lest we discourage others from attempting the same.
Why? Do we not want to discourage others from attempting to build rent-seeking platforms?
(a) "I want to design and sell a great device: a new kind of smartphone, with radically improved UX and capabilities"
(b) "I have a great device that everybody wants. Instead of directly raising its price, I want to make money by getting a 30% cut of all business ever done on this device, forever"
(a) is a perfectly fine business plan, and it doesn't hamper anyone else's competitive efforts. The follow-up (b) however _only_ works as a monopolistic plan. If the device isn't very successful, the rent-seeking will further drive away app developers. But if the device becomes incredibly popular, app developers will have to suck up the extortionate price because I've locked down the market.
Peter Thiel said "Competition is for suckers", and this is a good example of it. The benefits of the free market come from competition, but companies will naturally strive hard to avoid competition. Therefore, the rules should make it hard for them to do so, and easy for competition to arise.
> It's not at all clear that these regulations will create a more innovation-oriented market. It could well be that they will hinder innovation. Do you have any ideas on how we can tell for sure? I think we should be pretty confident before using regulation, don't you?
On the one side: hundreds and hundreds of promising startups whose products only ended up raising the existing giants' moat even higher, when not cancelled outright.
On the other side: gosh, what if someone in the future had the next iPhone-level innovation in hand, but the idea of having to turn it into a semi-open platforms after a paltry fifteen years of obscene profits turned them off the idea?
I'm not so much saying that the benefits will be massive, as much as I'm saying the 'deterrent' risk is hilariously negligible.
The success rate doesn't need to be 100% for my point to be valid.
WhatsApp and Instagram could very well have eaten Facebook's lunch. Now FB is being threatened for the first time by TikTok, why? Because they're a Chinese company and FB can't simply buy them due to Chinese regulations!
Also consider this: in an idealised, perfect free market, every company is just barely breaking even, because as soon as they're making a profit it means it's possible to undercut them. (Bezos: "Your margin is my opportunity").
The existence of massive liquidity in the hands of some companies is itself evidence of inefficiency.
> Not per se, but history shows that even the most entrenched monopolies are very prone to disruption. I don't see any non-banks in the Fortune 100 that are over a century old.
Poor evidence, since antitrust action was very strong in the USA for most of the 20th century.
> First we would have to agree on what "net negative" means, agree that our vision of what to do about it would improve the situation, and agree that we have a right to take such an intervention. Do you see where the problem is?
Yes, people can disagree on what their preferred society looks like. That's the fundamental problem of politics. But that disagreement can include the exact value of freedom.
I personally rate freedom very high, yet the restraint "if you manage to build a trillion-dollar company, you must not make it unnecessarily hard for others to develop better products than yours" sounds like a slam-dunk kind of sacrifice for the sake of a more efficient innovation-oriented market.