The key is in an open and permissionless technological alternative.
Yes, I agree the government did ONE thing that helped some people and that is pass a law mandating that you could port your phone number between carriers.
But no, splitting up Ma Bell into a cartel of phone companies did little to lower the price of phone calls. Technology like Voice Over IP did that overnight.
The Web disrupted walled gardens like AOL overnight. Trillions of dollars in value was unlocked with business models like SaaS and e-commerce. Splitting AOL into 5 AOLs wouldn’t do that.
The reason Google, Facebook, Amazon and all thr Big Tech companies even were able to get their start (and funding) is because they built on top of the open and permissionless Web!
Do you really think AOL or MSN would have allowed a search engine, a social network and a massive global store to grow within their walled garden and not pay then any rent? And they wouldn’t cannibalize them like Twitter did with Periscope and so many other platforms did with their startups? Come on :)
Not only should they be split up, but we need retroactive fines for all of the anti-competitive things they have done. Additionally, I think we need different taxes based on the size of the company and we also need regulations to ban certain practices like rent seeking in app stores or bundling in the case of Microsoft or loss leading when you are a large company. Any business built on network effects should be forced to be interoperable once it is big enough.
Finally, we need to recognize that some businesses that are very large are basically as influential as government agencies and as critical as a utility service. These companies should not be operating like a random private entity but should be regulated. As an example, the largest social media companies should be treated like common carriers or utilities.
As a libertarian, I propose that in addition to this, we as a developer community also try building good open source software to take on Big Tech, and not simply rely on one giant monolithic thing (Big Government) to save us from another giant thing (the Big Tech oligopoly).
Here is how we can take back our communities without waiting for Big Government to rein in Big Tech (which, with Vance and Musk and Google and Facebook and Microsoft & OpenAI, will only capture it more, considering how much they spend on lobbying)…
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
We are lucky that Facebook has open sourced Llama (making lemons out of lemonade after that fiasco with the researchers leaking the weights). Imagine if they didn’t. Would breaking up OpenAI and Google DeepMind into smaller companies somehow help the little guy? They broke up Ma Bell DECADES AGO and long distance calls still cost $3 a minute. Why? It is only when open protocols for VoIP came out did the cost drop to near 0 overnight.
Open and permissionless protocols like SMTP and HTTP were the reason that the walls of AOL, MSN, Compuserve and other walled gardens fell. Not any government action. AOL open sourcing netscape is the reason we even got Mozilla Firefox and competition to Microsoft’s browser monopoly which they got with their “embrace, extend, exintnguish” strategy.
There WAS an antitrust case against Microsoft. But it was the presence of viable open source competition to their internet browser that was far more important. Konqueror led to WebKit, which led to Safari and then Chrome. Firefox was always there as well. This stuff matters. Government antritrust by itself won’t save you from the problems of Big Tech.
_also_ much of what is needed for core infrastructure is hardware, which will pretty much always end up being centralized as it’s expensive to lay fiber optic lines.
Also, Llama is not open source. You can’t open source model weights, they’re just freeware. And it has a commercial restriction in its usage license…
IMO the fix for this is actually more government. Internet infrastructure should be a utility, ideally with an optional state run infrastructure, so that anyone can have internet access.
And frankly, there is a lot to be said for collaboration instead of competition. The mindset in the US has been one of rugged capitalism and competition. But this is often less efficient when it comes to building platforms, as Big Tech has.
Model weights are open sourced. You may not know how they were trained, but you can run them locally for many purposes - people have built businesses around LLaMa, Stable Diffusion, Bloom etc. Imagine if they couldn’t?
Llama was open sourced partly because Mark Z was always an open source guy. Before he made Facebook, he open sourced Synapse rather than selling it to Microsoft for $1M. After he made Facebook, he wanted to make an open, decentralized, permissionless file-sharing system called “Wirehog”.
The reason he didn’t do it, is that he went to Silicon Valley and met Sean Parker, who introduced him to “the old boys club” of VCs there.
I was there at the first TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC when Parker proudly told everyone that “they has put a bullet in that thing”:
https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/
Parker knew very well what happens when another IP-fueled oligopoly, the Big Music Industry (MPAA, RIAA) goes after you for open file sharing. He learned the lesson well and started Plaxo, got VC funding.
Parker introduced Zuck to Peter Thiel, whose motto even back then was “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. The “Paypal Mafia” including Thiel and Musk had gone on to build lots of Big Companies.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...
Mentors like that turned Zuck from an open source bro into a corporate golden boy who ruthlessly buys up the competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, tried to buy Snapchat etc) and takes advantage of user privacy to monetize any way they can:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
He has recently rehabilitated his image, and largely because of open sourcing Llama and being “the open alternative to ‘OpenAI’”
The mindset of Silicon Valley VCs is part of the larger cycle of “capturing value” inside large companies, their capital is there to “remove friction”, get critical mass and go public in an IPO. Then the shareholders continue to demand the company extracts rents from the ecosystem.
Last year we even learned more than half of the VCs and their startups ALL BANKED AT THE SAME BANK! To me this is a great symbol of just how centralized the whole old boys club is. And the same Peter Thiel started a run on that bank.
In the end it all comes down to money buying power, attracting more money. Musk buys votes and pays republicans, who make him richer. Same for big pharma/oil/tabacco.
Probably there is a natural law that finally keeps the Pareto inequality in place?
This was hard fought because companies like microsoft controlled the major SMTP and HTTP clients, so they controlled the de-facto standard.
Most people today are running hardware with closed-source software and locked bootloaders so the idea that we can just change our minds and have a competitive environment tomorrow is false to boot. It would take a major cultural shift to change.
I think we can do a lot better without a heavy hand.
Beer is different than tech. Not everyone has instant access to the vast majority of beer in their pocket.
But even after this decision, the executive bears little resemblance to James’s system of power. In a second Trump term, we might reasonably expect chaos, paralysis, and destruction. But a carefully calibrated cosmos of power? Hardly.A software registry model could work for common decentralized protocols. You need decentralization technology to be able to compete with the Amazons and Googles.
The trick is, as with software package registries, you don't prescribe a certain package or protocol, you just ensure that there is a convenient way to install packages.
Part of it could literally be based on existing packages registries and decentralized systems like PyPi, IPFS, blockchains, etc. Take Amazon for example. Government would say that, for example, every product for sale has to be listed in some kind of decentralized index that is not effectively controlled by a small number of companies. Government doesn't need to prescribe which ones, let the market decide and have it keep evolving. But we can't let Amazon become a centralized database for everything.
Look into things like ActivityPub, Zora, Origin Protocol, IPFS, the new Freenet, blockchains in general.
You can still build business on top of protocols and get added value without locking into single company controlling transactions or databases.
Thirty years ago, I was optimistic that personal devices and software were a kind of capital, like power-tools, which was spreading out to allow people to better themselves and their lives... But nowadays it feels more like nets being cast by some (decidedly un-biblical) fishers of men, where it's all about ensnaring customers and holding their data and social-webs hostage, sometimes even fostering gambling addictions.
So while I do want to see some (near-)monopolies disrupted, it won't be a panacea: We'll still have important systemic problems to face, such as the terrible DMCA, clickwrap contracts of adhesion, issues around "right to repair", and how advertising/spyware as a revenue stream slowly corrupts everything it touches.
Tools should be in control of their owners. If not, the owner becomes the tool of those that control them.
Old computing had a very philosophical bend this way - the open source movement was about empowering individuals.
I don't think that's coming back - at least not in a non-cynical version. A new thought has to exist.
Old tech companies had a business model of selling a product to a customer.
The change occurred with advertising. It's now the core business of the biggest tech companies. With that, the perspective of how to be successful as a tech company changed. Manipulating the customer through marketing, suggesting, and nudging is now the model.
When manipulation is your business model, you're no longer improving the world.
How do we get back to aligning companies with their customers?
It's not fate that manipulation dominates. It's just one business model. And probably not the greatest one.
This is literally the reason why Stallman created FSF and promoted free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Devices running free software obey the users, not the corporation.
We figure out every single objective that industry lobbyists ever achieved, and we do the opposite.
In my opinion the biggest issue right now is the insanity of intellectual property. They use it to kill competition and stop others from breaking their business models. We should be able to reverse engineer an app and build a free software replacement that talks to their servers but right now that's a crime.
Rentierism is out of control, the ISM services sector needs to run sub-50 while manufacturing hits 70 for a couple years to fix this societal imbalance!
Hardware consoles suck because three (count 'em!) companies make them. They sell them at a loss even because monopolizing the sales and distribution and development channel is profitable enough to make up for this. If you want better consoles you need more companies making them in a market place they cannot fully control.
I think PCs have won for gaming in this century simply because of their ability to multitask. The modern gamer has discord and twitch and like 10 other social media apps open. The viral nature of games is key to success. Many (the most successful?) games like minecraft start out as PC-exclusives due to the additional hurdles associated with distributing a console game.
Consoles tried to make a cash cow with subscription services, and succeeded for a while, but eventually the whole sub-industry of console gaming kind of lost its edge and croaked. There are hardly any exclusives, hardly any network effect so the unique selling point is gone.
It reminds me of how bell labs missed out on the mobile phone because it would not take advantage of their existing infrastructure. The more companies try to tighten their grip on a market, the more inevitable their failure to evolve in the long term.
If we are talking about printer companies, the more they build their business around restricting and selling ink cartiges, the less they will be able to adapt to new tech. When the next new thing rolls around (IDK printable holograms or something?) they will suffer because it won't mesh with their ossified business model
These trusted computing systems represent a massive future political problem that remains too complex for the average voter to comprehend, let alone solve. It is a similar class of problems as net neutrality, except with dramatically greater impact.
Very core to the author's argument, it seems, is the idea that the Reagan and Clinton administrations caused the proliferation of modern monopolies, but no more than a few paragraphs is spent discussing this.
I think this article would have benefited from more detailed research into the effects of their economic policies, and less detailed research on King James I.
I think this explains why humanity has repeatedly failed to achieve anything close to universal justice; every time the oppressed rise up, they do so vengefully and unjustly; and they create new future enemies for themselves.
The worst aspect of this is that there seems to be a subset of oppressors who manage to retain power through multiple cycles and they often achieve this by being particularly greedy, ruthless or deceitful. But who knows, maybe they're just operating on a longer cycle? The past has a way of catching up.
We should try hard to identify and correct injustices that we may be unwittingly perpetrating onto others as it creates hidden enemies. These are the worst kinds of enemies because you may view them as your friends. You may not realize their true disposition until they've backstabbed you.
It's easy to radicalize an oppressed person. You just need to give them a compelling narrative which explains how they've been oppressed. Oppressed people are often desperate for narratives to explain the multitude of negative internal feelings that they and/or their ancestors have accumulated as a result of decades or centuries of oppression.
Ah, but does that pattern really happen in history, or is it just a recurrent trope, like how a hundred generations of elderly people each keep claiming "youths have no manners anymore"?
To quote from the intro to a lengthy piece [0] on the subject:
> This complex of ideas is what I phrase as the Fremen Mirage, and as you might imagine from that word ‘mirage,’ there are real, gaping problems in this vision of history.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
One clear example is what's happening in the middle east. It seems that the oppressed became the fiercest oppressors.
However I fail to find other clear examples.
Most of French nobility was killed off and replaced by peasants. Those peasants are now running the country and EU and are oppressing the population with high taxes, corporatism and globalism.
In medieval times, Jews were kicked out of various countries when they became too prosperous while debt levels for the general population got out of control.
More recently, the DEI movement also shows elements of this reversal of oppression. Many people will argue that it's now discriminating against whites.
These issues are usually controversial because they are backed by tensions between the oppressed and their oppressors. The oppressed will attempt to maximize their victimhood and the oppressors will attempt to minimize their responsibility.