…are becoming oligarchs:
Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site. In contrast, the world’s top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world’s oil production.
Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country’s third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.
This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed.
…Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.
This seems related to this.
Argh.
Everything about that is stupid or wrong.
ditto.
I engage with those companies and/or individuals voluntarily, when I find it of benefit to me. They have no power to force me to do anything, and if they defraud me I have judicial means of extracting restitution as long as govt doesn’t meddle in our freedom to contract.
That any of these companies has a vast majority of market share in their market does not bother me, because as long as govt. isn’t meddling, they only obtain it and keep it by providing the best value to their customers (compared to their competitors), and the service or product they provide is voluntarily traded for commensurate with its ability to improve customer lives.
The author calls organizations built on voluntary transactions evil, and considers coercion to be our savior. A twisted creature.
because as long as govt. isn’t meddling
The government is meddling, often at the request of the powerful. Microsoft demonstrated what happens when they don’t request it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t help you keep the government out of your business.
I don’t think that the smart money is on needing to break up Google 100 years from now like Ma Bell in the 1980s. I worry more about Microsoft and Apple now that their founders have moved on.
Having Sergey, Larry and Eric at the helm of Google and Elon at the helm of Tesla and SpaceX and Jeff at the helm of Amazon, the Washington Post and Blue Origin is the makings of a Golden Age of electric automobiles (that are actually automatic!), ebooks, journalism and space settlement rather than a trust buster emergency.
Republicans could make some headway if they’d consciously decide to fight on behalf of small businesses at every opportunity.
The whole Anti-Trust push has watered down too far. If there are fewer than five serious competitors, the ‘monopoly rules’ should be used. If you wait until it’s just one, it’s already mostly too late.
Also a fan of a ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ (Split it into 5, and released). Which really just isn’t, but would give some decent “Yes, we -do- want them to play -fair-” credit.
The mega-corps and the entire idea of ‘too big to fail’ leads to some invulnerable-thinking. Fix that.
Republicans could make some headway if they’d consciously decide to fight on behalf of small businesses at every opportunity.
Agree with this. Push the little guy. If the big guy needs to fail, he will (unless the government bails them out and that needs to stop).
I don’t like Google, so I use Bing. Yes, Bing is Microsoft, but I could use Dogpile. I used to use Yahoo, which was big before Google and Facebook.
So, fix the problem of companies buying bureaucrats and political favors (because bureaucrats are selling), by increasing the number of bureaucrats they can pay off to either (a) leave them alone or (b) harass their competitors? Isn’t that just more of the exact damn problem we have now?
How about abolish all anti-trust and ability of government to meddle in any voluntary business transaction? That’s the root of the problem – politicians selling their “services” of force.
I don’t buy this premise. Buying politicians was a way of stifling competition then. Here we have market demand and the market is filling that demand. If people didn’t enjoy Facebook they would move on. In fact they inevitably will. It just takes one bad marketing move on Facebook’s part, one bad PR move and the next cool thing will take its place. Microsoft can feel the ground shaking beneath them. With so many more platforms out there running thinner and thinner OS’s they are beginning to look like a dinosaur. Apple is no better off, both needs to be competitive if they expect to survive. Losing a leader and falling behind are as much a part of this system as is the meteoric rise of these companies.
Remember Obama’s dismissal of the Apple product ban imposed by the FTC in favor of Samsung? Yep those oligarchs are in plain force out there allright.
it used to be the FTC would oppose mergers if they were anti-competitive. Long term the worst monopolists die off, but they can do a decade of damage depending upon
how they go into their death throes. Enron did a lot of harm to people before they imploded. Microsoft is finally in it’s final innings but they held back the industry
for a good 15 years. If there is very little barrier to entry or exit (Search, I can switch to Bing or wolfram alpha or yahoo or altavista if it’s still up) but moving out of
gmail could be a bit of a problem. The other is collusion. If the 2 or 3 big alternates collude on pricing, then it’s not competitive. Cable vs Satellite, you need 2-3 vendors there. When I was in maryland, we had 2 cable companies, FIOS, and 2 satellite companies plus wireless data through ricochet and 3G/4G cell. very competitive, lots of choice. But i’ve lived in places where Cable internet was it or where you paid big dollars for a Fractional T-1.
Apple uses iTunes to lock people in, that’s a network effect, while Android, you can swap out, and get apps elsewhere.
The better case is pharma paying off generic manufacturers to not produce generic drugs, it’s indefensible.
I dare anyone to defend those.