The ONLY answer is antitrust action from every major government.
The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun.
Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared with the (formerly?) open web and desktop of the 90's - 10's, we've wound up in a computing universe where we're all serfs.
We're in a stagnant world where platforms don't evolve because that's where the moats lie.
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta desperately need to be broken up into multiple subsidiary companies. It'll oxygenate the entire tech sector and unlock pent up, unrealized value for the shareholders of these equities.
The reason we seldom see centicorn startups or blockbuster tech IPOs is because FAANG (or whatever we call it nowadays) has a dragnet where they can snuff out the markets of new upstarts or M&A on the cheap.
It costs nothing for Amazon to become Hollywood, buy James Bond and Lord of the Rings, become a primary care doctor, become a grocery store, and cross-sell all of these highly unrelated products on prime advertising real estate. It's essentially free for them to put ads at the top of the Amazon store and emblazen it on their delivery trucks and boxes. The old media, which were once healthy competitors, have to spend hundreds of millions to reach the same eyeballs.
We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0 and it's deeply damaging our market. The innovators and innovation capital are no longer being rewarded. The calcified institutions are snuffing out everything that moves in search of remaining growth.
We must break up these companies. That is the only healthy way forward.
100% agree that decisive anti-trust action is needed. In addition, many of us can (and do) choose to just not participate (to the best of our abilities) in the nonsense from these companies.
Many of us are not required to use Apple devices (and we choose not to). Additionally, many of us are able to choose privacy-respecting Android variants (like GrapheneOS). It sometimes is less "convenient", but IMHO it is better then surrendering to the duopoly...
Interoperability is a commons; the market won't protect it on its own, because each individual consumer's best action is to just get an iPhone and an Apple Watch.
But the market (and society at large) is ultimately worse off when Pebble and FitBit and Garmin can't compete on a level playing field with Apple Watch— particularly when Pebble is targeting a completely different feature set, price point, and battery profile from what Apple Watch does.
I don't, and I won't, but that doesn't really address the points in that post. There is nothing any individual can do about massive corporate cartels controlling entire industries and strangling all potential competition in the cradle, like they said anti-trust enforcement is the only way. But apparently it'll be difficult to garner support for that when people perceive it as an attack on their 'consumer preferences'
Apple and iPhone are a gravitational singularity distorting every single market in the world.
Software companies bend the knee to Apple.
Global payments companies bend the knee to Apple.
Entertainment companies bend the knee to Apple.
On and on and on...
You cannot find a corner of the world that iPhone does not distort, tax, shape, or control in some shape or fashion. Some companies and industries to such an extreme that Apple becomes not just their landlord, but their master.
Desktop computing could never do this. Microsoft never had such draconian rules.
The automotive market doesn't resemble this. Dozens of countries have five or six major automakers. There's something for every budget and niche.
Gaming could never do this. There are three major consoles, six major PC distribution channels, mobile gaming, indie gaming, web gaming, tabletop/physical gaming - that market is huge. Honestly, this is what mobile computing should look like.
Only mobile computing and the web have become so perverted and encumbered. These markets are beyond Standard Oil levels of distortion. And the worst part is how massive, important, and all-encompassing these markets are. Everything in life is touched by these markets.
Why? Can't you just not take advantage of it is it's there? Why demand it to not be here? What ill consequences do you suffer from having the option for additional interoperability?
IMO it makes sense to nationalize things that lend themselves to natural monopolies, or sectors where innovation has mostly dried up on account of maturity, where continued progress is largely driven by tax-funded research grants already. I'm not convinced that "computing" is such an industry, innovation seems dead there because of monopoly. In that case, they should be broken up to drive competition-fueled innovation, with careful supervision to monitor for and punish anti-consumer behavior, abuse of negative externalities, etc.
If it turns out that even then, 10-20 years from now the market is still making mostly glass/metal rectangles with the same feature set of today, then we can consider consolidating that productive capacity for the sake of efficiency.
i think this pov buys too tightly into the idea that national projects arent innovative they are often more innovative than the private sector but it requires buy in and focus from their managers and funding from politicians
The Soviet Union had everything nationalized and it always accountable only to the Politburo. This idea that governments are “accountable” is cute. Government shouldn’t be running businesses.
Building and maintaining a functional marketplace (e.g. through common-sense anti-trust enforcement) is about more than just optimizing for a specific outcome...
Microsoft of that era is a tiny bug compared to the trillion dollar giants of today.
You could install whatever you wanted on Windows. Any software, any browser. Microsoft was incredibly open with both software and hardware compatibility.
You didn't have to use IIS or C# or Microsoft technology to develop software. You could develop and deploy PHP, Apache, Perl, C, anything. And about that time, Linux servers and distribution were massively growing in popularity. There were so many options.
It was even easy to pirate Windows and other software if you really wanted to. Basically, it was a complete Wild West with lots of latitude and room to navigate for everyone. Microsoft really only pursued enterprise contracts.
And the market back then was incredibly small. The number of desktop broadband and dialup users pales in comparison to the total number of smartphone users we have today.
The situation today is wholly different on every level. Two companies own how society stays connected, how it conducts commerce, and how it shares information. It's gross how much power they have. And how they choose to enforce it and tax it.
I don't think we need any major government intervention.
What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
Europe and Brazil already have such laws, though they could go farther.
> What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
Trouble is that most major governments are democratic, meaning that the governmental powers that be are the very same people (the population at large) who are already not willing to do anything about it. The majority will clearly isn't there at this time (that can change in the future, of course).
Government is a useful tool to clean up the dissenters who wish to act against the will of the people, but under a democracy you cannot believe that the majority are the dissenters. That defies the entire premise.
Apple Silicon could not have existed without the vast amount of capital that a trillion dollar company like Apple could've mustered, TSMC might even be one or two generations behind where it is right now if Apple couldn't afford bankroll the latest generation and temporarily monopolize it, and for that reason alone I'm fine with the state of affairs
It's also great that Apple is able to negotiate with countries as an equal wrt. user privacy, iMessage is the only e2e encrypted messenger allowed in China, and is currently able to mobilize a significant political movement against mandatory backdoors in the UK
The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun.
Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared with the (formerly?) open web and desktop of the 90's - 10's, we've wound up in a computing universe where we're all serfs.
We're in a stagnant world where platforms don't evolve because that's where the moats lie.
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta desperately need to be broken up into multiple subsidiary companies. It'll oxygenate the entire tech sector and unlock pent up, unrealized value for the shareholders of these equities.
The reason we seldom see centicorn startups or blockbuster tech IPOs is because FAANG (or whatever we call it nowadays) has a dragnet where they can snuff out the markets of new upstarts or M&A on the cheap.
It costs nothing for Amazon to become Hollywood, buy James Bond and Lord of the Rings, become a primary care doctor, become a grocery store, and cross-sell all of these highly unrelated products on prime advertising real estate. It's essentially free for them to put ads at the top of the Amazon store and emblazen it on their delivery trucks and boxes. The old media, which were once healthy competitors, have to spend hundreds of millions to reach the same eyeballs.
We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0 and it's deeply damaging our market. The innovators and innovation capital are no longer being rewarded. The calcified institutions are snuffing out everything that moves in search of remaining growth.
We must break up these companies. That is the only healthy way forward.