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Anti-Trust! Saving you the ravages of...Google?
Tzar
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http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?secid=1502&status=article&id=329002707691108
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072700421.html
Premise: Anti-trust is an arbitrary, destructive policy used to cripple the best companies in order to prop up their weak competitors in the name of "fairness". These practices have no place in a free economy, let alone any economy struggling through a recession. Even though the second article is a European issue, Obama has not made a peep in defense of Intel, an American company.
So tell me now, why is hamstringing Google the American Federal government's moral duty?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072700421.html
Premise: Anti-trust is an arbitrary, destructive policy used to cripple the best companies in order to prop up their weak competitors in the name of "fairness". These practices have no place in a free economy, let alone any economy struggling through a recession. Even though the second article is a European issue, Obama has not made a peep in defense of Intel, an American company.
So tell me now, why is hamstringing Google the American Federal government's moral duty?
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Do you really not know anything about monopolies? Or about the late 19th / early 20th century American economy and corporate structure?
Trust-busting is a rather important function of the federal government, actually. Even when it happens to companies we like.
Also, even a cursory familiarity with economics would disabuse you of your preposterous premise. Monopolies are market aberrations that are horrible for consumers. Philosophic objections that the Government "shouldn't" interfere with a market need to take a back seat to pragmatic concerns that arise when the market naturally or otherwise enters a grossly harmful and aberrant state.
this.
Yeah somethin tells me Anti-trust isn't "arbitrary and destructive".
The abuses you're referring to, such as early railroad entities, were almost always because of the government siding with a particular business interest, and giving it an unfair advantage. An interesting fact is that the first thing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was used for was to break up unions, an example of the government using its arbiter powers irresponsibly.
The first article also has no evidence of Google being in the spotlight, they'd need to be anti competitive to get targeted, not just the bulk of the search market. What the article does is quote "antitrust enforcers" as saying they're the target, but all the sourced quotes are experts and people who hate antitrust laws.
Intel deserved it: it undercut the market and applied pressure on vendors to not stock the competition's product in order to essentially burn an at the time superior chip by making it impossible for end users to obtain. It was using it's dominant market position to actively stifle consumer choice. MS got smacked for it by fighting dirty as well. It's operating system exposed a documented API for people to use to compete with them (office type products) and used a second unexposed API that did the same functions faster (by not having needless waits in them) for it's own products. It was purposefully sabotaging competing products on it's own platform. Same with prebundling it's own software, knowing your average end user would just use whatever was installed, not look for another media player or browser.
Antitrust is a pretty important thing to keep free markets from becoming a single vendor solution in every product line.
They also stifle innovation in that product area. Such behavior is seen by buying up smaller startup competition with a novel new idea, and camping the patent while killing the product. No good comes from a stifled market.
Which is why it's not sitting in anyone's sights for antitrust litigation? Google isn't a target because it's not doing anything a monopoly is not allowed to.
edit: if they start buying up alternative search engines left and right and proceed to force competition out of the market, they will be. Right now? They're just a market leader.
A: Make a better search engine
B: Wait for Google to start sucking
I mean... the way the Internet works is that when something hits, it hits huge. Use it or you're not cool. And when something stops hitting, or when something new and similar starts hitting, people start moving on to the next thing.
In other industries, this might be cause for an anti-trust investigation, yes, but... Internet doesn't work that way.
Besides, aren't they starting to run ads for a new search engine? Bing, I think it's called? Maybe that's what beats Google. Who knows?
The problem is that in a free market, this doesn't happen. The charge against Standard Oil back in the day was that it wasn't allowing anyone to compete, and that it would charge exorbitant prices because of its large market share. Problem was, the price gouge never came, and Standard Oil made massive jumps in availability, price, and safety of kerosene lamp fuel.
but they're listening to every word I say
So if Microsoft and Intel were subject to less regulation in the past the Software and Processor markets would be more competitive right now? Is that what you're claiming?
I gave you the example. Microsoft was actively sabotaging alternative office systems on Windows by giving it's own Office product access to the real APIs, and giving things like wordperfect access to APIs that did the same function but included pointless wait commands. It was using it's market position as a leader in the OS side to give it's Office product line an unfair advantage.
That is what antitrust is about. Because the free market isn't fair, and it becomes trivial for a market leader to employ unfair business tactics to torpedo competitors before the market can actually take a hand in the choice.
I largely agree with your premise, but I'd argue that Microsoft started "sucking" because they were spending all of their time fighting anti-trust lawyers instead of making their OS effective and likable. And the market will often work much like the internet. Massive companies in the real world still have to deal with competition and innovation.
Massive oil company has 90% share? Oil's rapidly disappearing. Film company sells 90% of camera film? Digital camera-pwn. People act as though once a company has a very large market share, everyone else has no chance and gives up, and the company never needs to change again.
Companies, no matter how large, still have to constantly adapt, innovate, and improve to stay with the times and changes in technology.
Your post is constructive and interesting.
um...yes it does? in a completely free market the biggest company doesnt have to be the best at what it does, but the best at eliminating competition. Standard Oil charged low prices when competition came about, prices that the competition couldn't give, and then with the competition gone raised its prices to whatever it wanted limit-free. that kind of crap is why, in the US at least, we dont have a %100 free market.
My big point here is that competition should not be the objective, freedom should be. Unless a company is sending armed men to another company, or coercing them in some tangible way other than "over-effectiveness of competition" then the government has no place interfering with their actions.
Which in itself is quite special, I wonder what the effect of the levels of globalisation allowed by the internet will have on a monopoly and whether the fact that Google being a pretty forward looking internet based buisness means they are particularly wary of how acting like a traditional monopoly will hurt them.
Obviously communication and information plays a huge part in how monopolys can form, the larger the number of people and the easier it is to get new information regarding opperating practices or new competitors the harder it is for a company to becomes a monopoly (though communication in the form of global transport links with limited amounts of information flowing along them would tend to favour monopolies).
If any country has serious anti-monopoly laws, then the whole world benefits assuming its a global product, assuming the government is taking steps to build a competitor in their country (then potentially accessable by the rest of the world). Do anti-monopoly laws kick in at a local level? Is a business allowed to dominate a state or city as a monopoly?
You are railing against Monopoly Rules, not Anti-Trust rules, iirc. Monopolies are allowed by have to play by slightly different rules about aggressively going against competitors. Anti-trust rules are entirely about sabotaging competition on the back end using your market share or cross company backchannel deals. An example of antitrust would be forcing a vendor to only carry your product or you'd triple the price of the product, if you had a market share large enough that said vendor carrying your product at 3x the price would completely cripple their sales.
Simply owning a large majority of a market does not = anti trust investigations.
Your post makes no sense at all. How can it eliminate competition if it wasn't better to start with?
Standard Oil became the best because Rockefeller was an obsessive basket case, who devoted every moment of his life to improving his business model. He never gouged anyone for oil, he in fact drastically improved the safety of kerosene and drove the price down dramatically.
And you're basing the bolded on ... what?
In the mid-90s Microsoft had such a stranglehold on the desktop OS market that it didn't make business sense for it to spend money on R&D when it could spend less money using it's market influence to stifle competition.
Yes, they would have to innovate eventually, purely because they need to keep the money rolling in, but there wasn't any competitive pressure on them to do so.
Freedom for who. Anti-trust laws are about freedom for the consumer, not the corporation. It's establishing rules of what you can do with a majority share in order to prevent you from stifling competition and reducing the consumer's freedom of product choice.
Another example is if you own 90% market share, buying out the last 10% and continuing to buy anyone who produces anything in that market. That's beyond a monopoly, and into actively stifling consumer choice.
Take Intel as an example. It became able to eliminate competition because it was the only major vendor. A competitor cropped up and beat it to market on a number of new chip types (true 64 bit x86 processing, for example), Intel's response was not to beat the chip, it was to force the vendors to NOT CARRY IT. edit: entirely due to their market share on 32 bit chips, and threatening to raise the prices on any vendor who carried the new AMD product.
Most people are talking about businesses that tangibly interfere in the business of their competitors. Examples include Intel bribing distributors not to carry competitor's products, and MS sabotaging the operation of it's competitors products.
Freedom is not a good absolute aim. Society would be more free in the absence of a justice system, but it doesn't mean it would be a better place to live.
The consumers already have freedom. They are free to purchase items from whatever company they want, free of coercion. Freedom doesn't mean that every company has a right to exist and maintain 30% of the market.
Freedom to succeed is also freedom to fail.
You don't think forcibly maintaining majority market share is coercion?
So what you're saying here is that you're not a big fan of Capitalism and markets?
Society would be less "restrained" in the absence of a justice system, but I disagree that we would be more "free" in the positive sense. We would be in constant fear of roving bands of criminals breaking into homes, there would be no way for people to settle disputes without a court system. And of course, I'm not arguing for some kind of capitalist anarchy here, I just don't believe these companies have done anything to warrant government punishment.
Also, Adam Smith.
As I pointed out: anti-trust laws are enforced when I lose the freedom to buy the product (or even learn of the product's existence in a reasonable manner)
Intel was paying off distributors and manufacturers to NOT CARRY their competitor's new product. Which means for Joe Consumer, there was no AMD64 chip. They would never see it in a store. The only way to buy it would be to call AMD and ask about the chip, order it seperate from a computer, and install it/the board yourself.
Not because AMD wasn't trying to offer this product to the market, but because a market leader was actively preventing it from reaching shelves. Reducing consumer choice.
Companies have a lot of freedoms. Being a monopoly is not a default bad state in the US, you don't get lawyers up your ass for it. Violating anti-trust laws by being an ANTI-COMPETITIVE monopoly does.
Define "force". Force, to me, is sending armed guys named Vinny to ruff up dat shopkeep what won't pay protection.
Making a world-beating product that blows everyone out of the water, to me, is not "force".
No one's talking about "making a world-beating product that blows everyone out of the water". We're talking about bribing shops to not sell your competitors products and things like that.
Anti-Trust concerns with regards to Google aren't related to its Search Engine but rather to its newly acquired deal with Publishers to have exclusive access to copyrighted books for their scanning process. Meaning that Google has a Monopoly on digitized books that existed after whenever Steamboat Willie came out (thanks again for our shitty Copyright Laws, Disney) or whatever. And that is something to be concerned about, no matter how awesome GMail is.