[mort96]

The basic fact of the matter is that >99% of people will never be interested in hosting their own e-mail server, and that's okay.

This means we need organizations to host e-mail for people. In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization. So far, governments have been seemingly uninterested in going after the large e-mail providers for anticompetitive practices; maybe that should change. But as long as those anticompetitive practices only really affect individual hobbyists who wanna host their own e-mail, while business interests are unaffected, I don't see this changing.

[vouaobrasil]

I don't think it just affects hobbyists. It allows affects people who want to use smaller email servers, or even people who WOULD use smaller email servers simply because larger ones did not exist.

I think the government SHOULD go after consolidation such as Google, and that traditional anti-trust law is insufficient to combat the dangers of large tech companies.

This is precisely because traditional anti-trust laws only look after large PROPORTIONS. In today's modern economy, due to its size, we have a danger that we've never seen before: large ABSOLUTE size, which was never a problem in history as it is today.

Therefore, we need new laws that go after absolute size, as well as large proportions (traditional anti-trust).

[yobbo]

> In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization.

No, a "capitalist system" does not lead to consolidation and monopolization.

[inglor_cz]

[Citation needed]

I am a big fan of free markets, but the trend towards consolidation, at least in activities that profit from efficiencies of scale, is unmistakable, to the degree that it often kills the market unless prevented.

You probably cannot "consolidate" a market of book authors and musical bands, because quality of artistic expression does not scale with money. But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.

[yobbo]

> But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.

Not quite. Publishing/recording depends on specific laws (intellectual property) to disable the competitive-market mechanisms. For example, copyright being extended to 95 years, but there are many other mechanisms surrounding copyrights that have enabled the current monopolies in publishing/recording.

[mort96]

Then why does antitrust regulations have to exist?

[vouaobrasil]

That is true, but an unbridled capitalistic system that has relatively weak controls for protection of the commens DOES lead to such things frequently. I am not against capitalism, but against the form of capitalism we have today, which is focused on arbitrary and endless growth with relatively little controls to prevent pathologies like Google.

[yobbo]

I'm not saying you are wrong, but it's maybe too early to describe Google as an example of "market failure" or "pathology".

One could debate if it's fair (or legal?) to let one side of the business (search ads) subsidise another (gmail) in order to crowd out competitors.

But that is neither an argument for or against "capitalism".