[Florin_Andrei]

It's almost as if self-reinforcing feedback loops are all over society these days. Being at the top makes it that much easier to stay at the top and crush everything else. Internet companies are just one small slice of this trend.

[79d697i6fdif]

antitrust is all bark with no bite these days. Most industries having 3-4 "competitors" that don't actually compete is the new norm. I wouldn't be amazed if a link is shown between this situation and the increasing wealth inequality

[tjalfi]

Antitrust laws were remarkably different in the recent past. Here is an excerpt from http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-....

"To get a flavor of how thoroughly the federal government managed competition throughout the economy in the 1960s, consider the case of Brown Shoe Co., Inc. v. United States, in which the Supreme Court blocked a merger that would have given a single distributor a mere 2 percent share of the national shoe market."

[cookiecaper]

Beyond simple anti-trust, in many cases, we need to reform legal structures so that big players can't use them to block out startups.

It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around, first of all. That affects everything, and big companies use that fact to bully upstarts and other small innovators into shutting down all the time.

My own business was effectively shuttered (had to stop selling our primary product) by a C&D from a Fortune 100. It would've been 5-10 years and ~$5 million to see that case all the way through, and under current precedent, it's very likely I would have lost.

Aside from that, industries frequently get laws and rules put in place with ostensibly-reasonable rationale, while the actual intent is to make it virtually impossible for disruptive competitors to enter the marketplace.

The CFAA is the piece of legislation that primarily enshrines entrenched players in the online space. We also need to reform copyright law and clarify some matters regarding the applicability of EULAs, especially with regard to clickwrap and browsewrap.

Once that's done, the flood of innovators that have been held back by big companies dispatching their law firms will finally be able to contribute, and the internet's competitve landscape will truly be back in the hands of the users. It will shift from "Who has my data? I have to go with them" to "I can use any interface I want to access that data", effectively resolving the chicken-and-egg effect that imperils any potential competing social network (not even Google could compete with Facebook on this!).

[Florin_Andrei]

> It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around

Large corporations keeping a bunch of lawyers on their payroll are the equivalent of large nation states stockpiling nuclear weapons.

[thehardsphere]

That's because you're viewing this situation entirely from within your prior beliefs about large corporations, which somehow have convinced you that only 3 or 4 hosting companies exist and everyone must use them.

Exactly how do you figure this? There are lots of alternatives to S3:

1. All the cloud stuff, which is the new fangled hotness (3 to 4 companies)

2. Non-cloud hosting providers (hundreds of them, from shared hosting to VPSs and above, and usually cheaper if you don't have high traffic)

3. Hosting your own stuff on your own hardware, which is the cheapest if you really need it, and can be done in a data center just about anywhere in the world with good internet.

So, what planet is this that you live on where 3 to 4 companies handle all hosting and we have to use them?