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by justaman 2745 days ago
I think the major tech companies should be broken up. However its not 1982 anymore. The global market(mainly China) threw a money wrench into the system. If you break up Google, that's mostly to the benefit of the CPC which will results in a market that's potentially worse than the one we have now.
3 comments
ardy42 2745 days ago
> If you break up Google, that's mostly to the benefit of the CPC which will results in a market that's potentially worse than the one we have now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/opinion/facebook-china-te...:

> Don’t Fall for Facebook’s ‘China Argument’

> America’s global dominance in technology requires fierce competition at home, not the coddling of monopolies.

Also, the Great Firewall is a massive trade barrier, which I think would justify trade-retaliation against the companies protected by it if they somehow they gained ground in the US due to domestic tech-company regulation.

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nindalf 2745 days ago
How would trade retaliation even work? Software isn't that straightforward to tax. For example, say you 2 video games, one of which is Chinese owned (say League of Legends), the other is American owned (say Dota 2). Tell me what justified trade retaliation you would use to promote one over the other? Would you add a $0.01 tax to cosmetics?

You can't do it. Of course it doesn't matter to the CPC what Tencent does with this game, because games are inconsequential. But if this wasn't Tencent's LoL, but rather WeChat we were talking about? At that point CPC policies, including censorship will be applied by Tencent. And what "trade-retaliation" will you use then?

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andy_ppp 2745 days ago
By benefiting free society you strengthen yourself against the CPC IMO.
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bogomipz 2745 days ago
>"If you break up Google, that's mostly to the benefit of the CPC which will results in a market that's potentially worse than the one we have now"

No, this false equivalency is something that Big Tech have created now that they are looking at the very real possibility of regulation. Please don't propagate this disingenuous and self-serving bit of economic nationalism for these companies.

It's also ironic that you mention Google in this context considering the existence Project Dragonfly.

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