[shishy]

(I can't find the full article as I'm not an economist subscriber)...

Isn't the general idea behind breaking them up that in their current state, these companies are near monopolies and make it impossible for new competition to thrive? Even more so because when they did have competition in the past (e.g. Facebook with Instagram), they just acquired them?

I wonder if regulators were not fully aware of this when that merger was happening -- I think Ben Thompson at Stratechery hinted at this in an article some time ago.

[heliodor]

There are different causes for monopoly and maybe they should be considered and addressed individually.

Type 1) Very high costs

You are free to build a competitor to Google Search. No one has the resources needed to build it or they don't think it's a good way to spend their resources if they do have them.

Type 2) The nature of the product renders competition difficult

You are free to compete with Facebook. Unfortunately, it's naturally a winner-take-all market because the more users you have, the more each user gets out of the product.

Type 3) The company behaves unfairly

You are not free to compete.

This is the one that most people think of most of the time when they say monopolies are bad. Once you have power, you take actions to maintain your power and crush newcomers.

[m-p-3]

I was reading some comments on Slashdot regarding the Spotify vs Apple story, and some where saying "Spotify just wants to sell music subscriptions while asking to be hosted for free on Apple's app store. If they don't like paying 30% they can just make their own device and app store".

Yeah, as if you can build an ecosystem as big as Apple from scratch just on the premise of selling music and nothing else. Some people are just out of touch with reality. Microsoft, with far more resources, tried with Windows Phone and it failed.

[chillacy]

What if: because building these things is hard, therefore it should be rewarding.

Instead the hard stuff gets commoditized over time.

Photolithography and operating systems are hard, but now social networking is where the money is at.