i am not an expert in this field obviously. much can be analyzed in terms of capital markets, free enterprise, the evils of government control, etc

at what point can the big tech companies be considered 'public utilities'. they certainly benefit massively from government contracts and legislation. our society has in turn benefited and now relies on their products / services.

there are scale issues now that basically preclude any 'upstart' from de-throning the likes of GOOG, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc

does too much power lie now in that hands of these corps? is the public interest served by more oversight?

i am typically very much a free enterprise proponent. now we see many views 'silenced' / de-platformed by un-elected individuals over 'controversial' content. the battle to control the mass media narrative is enormous.

is there a solution ? (government usually screws things up so i'm not overly supportive of that direction...)

-------------------------------

I don't know, but let me drop in my observation.

Years ago the politicians would bust up a big company into smaller ones. The politicians (Federal Senators & Representatives) loved the attention, power, etc. It was really just a political move. Witness the breakup of AT&T back in the 1980's ( I think it was ) and now they're all pretty much back together again.
Nowadays, my opinion is that the same body of politicians have morphed into the idea that they can now control these big companies, at least at least to some extent, and benefit themselves.
Same goes for the CEO's, they benefit from having the same.

Politicians and business CEO's can trash talk each other, but at the end of they day they're in bed together, hands in each others pockets.

Money Money Money, follow the money.

And one more thing, the seperation of government and private industry is blurred, to say the least. We used to hear that the government can't discriminate against people, but private business can. Now it seems that the politicans use private business (read liberal businesses) are now in bed and controlled by/with the liberals to do their bidding and no effective repurcussions seen or made.

Witness the breakup of AT&T back in the 1980's

I worked for Bell Laboratories when AT&T was broken up. The reason the Feds did this (per their reasoning) was that AT&T was so large that it was a monopoly and could deter a competitor trying to enter the market.

While other competitors were allowed to enter the market at reduced rates after the breakup (compared to AT&T rates), the overall structure and reliability of telecommunications systems took a dive.

Yeah, it has rebounded and some competitors have really good products, but I wonder where we would be today had AT&T been left intact. Their R&D (Bell Labs) was second to none at the time and was earning many patents per month.

First, in a truly free market, the monopolies we see today would likely not exist. Every single one of them does so because of an incestuous relationship between Big Business and the government, laying the groundwork to allow these monopolies to not only exist, but also to protect them against any challenges. I tend to believe that monopolies exist and thrive because of government.

Now, should government be in charge of regulating or breaking them up when government was instrumental in creating and protecting them in the first place? Google, Facebook, Amazon and others have too much power and control of markets today which is not healthy for the US economy when it comes to the end consumer. So how do we fix that imbalance? I really don't know at this point. These companies have gotten so big, and have bought so many politicians, I just don't know what can be done to return some sense of balance to the system.

quote:

at what point can the big tech companies be considered 'public utilities'.

They will be come "public utilities" when the politicians have no use for them anymore.
The libs love them doing their dirty work censoring conservatives for them and they are in power.
The conservatives have a tendency to look blindly at all big businesses but now they could do nothing if they wanted to.

None of them are monopolies in the sense the old trust were (think Standard Oil, AT&T, etc.)

There are other search engines besides Google (Bing, Duck Duck Go). Android (also Google) and Apple go head to head. Amazon competes with Walmart. Facebook and Google compete in certain areas. If Google bought Apple, and the only source for a cell phone OS where them, then maybe that could be broken up.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
There are other search engines besides Google (Bing, Duck Duck Go).

Come on now, let's be accurate and fair. Google controls anywhere between 86%-90% of the search market worldwide. That is a pure monopoly by anyone's definition. Their closest competitor is Bing owning about ~7% of the market. All the rest are all but irrelevant.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that generally (but not entirely consistently), the courts have not held that a business having a monopoly is illegal just because the business has a monopoly.

Rather, the courts have held a monopoly to be illegal when it is either obtained in certain prohibited ways (like forcibly taking over or driving out of business all competitors) or the power of the monopoly is used in certain prohibited ways (like price fixing, creating artificial barriers to competition, etc). Basically, for the most part, the courts are only interested in addressing "bad" monopolies.

Taking Google's search business as an example, maybe Google could legally qualify as monopolizing search engines. However, they got there by having a better search engine than anyone else, they didn't go out and buy up or force out of business all their competitors. Now that they own the search market, they aren't using that power to charge more (still free), they aren't trying to damage competing search engines by not including them in Google search results, they aren't saying you can only use Google search if you buy X product or service, and so on.

So Google owns the search market, but because there's nothing stopping anyone else from making their own search engine and taking some of Google's market share besides the fact that Google search is very good and pretty much everyone uses it, they don't generally fit the criteria the courts have used to target harmful monopolies.

Apple is more of a gray area because of questionable practices like requiring any payment for any digital good or service on any app on iOS to go through the Apple App Store so that Apple can get their 30% cut. They won't even let apps say "go to our website to pay to subscribe."

Stuff like that is CLEARLY harmful monopoly bullshit. If you have an iPhone and you want to buy an album on Apple Music, you just pay for the album. No other music service will sell you albums in an iPhone app, because they'd have to give Apple a 30% cut.

No one in the US government seems to care, but various European and Asian governments have gone after Apple a number of times for various anticompetitive bullshit.

Definition of public utilities is at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/16/2602.

Second question is how do we manage anti-competitive behavior brought about artificially by monopoly instead of organically by having a superior/unique product or better business acumen and for that I concur with maladat.

Sherman Act is about restraint of trade. The quickest explanation of the Act is U.S. Dep't of Justice, Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act (2008), at ww.usdoj.gov/atr/public/reports/236681.htm, see also https://www.justice.gov/atr/co...herman-act-chapter-1.

By way of example, you can read about the "browser wars" in Corts, Kenneth S., and Deborah Freier. "A Brief History of the Browser Wars." Harvard Business School Case 703-517, June 2003. It's paywalled but available at https://store.hbr.org/product/...7?sku=703517-PDF-ENG.