| > defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed So basically entrenched companies in specific markets would be extremely hard to challenge unless you have very large amounts of capital just laying around doing nothing? Even start-ups would struggle a lot more to get funding because no established company outside of that specific market would be allowed to purchase them. I'm not sure overall that would benefit consumers that much (IMHO the complete opposite but it's debatable). Of course it depends on how the boundaries are defined, but just in tech: Apple (being a computer company) would have never been allowed to develop the iPod/Phone/Pad without spinning them off into independent companies? Google (being an OS provider) wouldn't have been able to sell Pixel phones themselves, but that wouldn't be an issue since Android probably wouldn't have been a thing in the first place. So we'd be permanently stuck with Symbian and Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Blackberry/etc. Same applies to MS, which is a great counterexample, despite all their resources and power they completely failed to leverage that in the mobile market. Then you have Intel vs ARM, Google and social media, even Kodak to an extent. Having a lot of money, resources and great engineering is not necessarily such a huge competitive advantage when trying to enter an adjacent market. You must also be capable of developing competitive/innovative products while not being afraid to cannibalize your current revenue streams. Especially if we're talking about major public companies. Pouring billions into some (potential) boondoggle without any immediate return is hard to pull off without generating a severe backlash from your investors. Having a seemingly "perfectly" competitive market (i.e. margins are close to the "risk-free" rate of return) doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of innovation because companies in such markets can't afford to make risky investments and tend to just focus on maximizing efficiency of current technologies. e.g. yes Google being able to fund Waymo with their Search/Ad revenue/etc. is not exactly fair to their potential competitors but IMHO preventing that would have significantly slowed down any real progress in the field. |
One alternative that could work is to mandate open APIs and a requirement for large platforms to carry all legal traffic and content. I know this is incredibly tricky as well. Who pays for the infrastructure? What about security and privacy issues? It raises many questions but it seems more promising as a direction of travel.