[ethbr1]

Indeed. I'd argue that failing to apply robust antitrust enforcement (as the US hasn't in the last 20 years) is short-sighted.

It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.

Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.

[philipallstar]

> Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.

[KoolKat23]

This doesn't change the fact that they cause societal problems operating at this scale. Should we be building their vision of the future or societies consensus vision of it?

[ethbr1]

I'd respectfully disagree.

The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.

The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).

It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.

E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok

[philipallstar]

I'm not saying it's all positive. I'm countering something that says it's all negative. And TikTok is more like Facebook than a small startup.

[ethbr1]

TikTok is more like Facebook now, but the genesis of it in Douyin isn't something Facebook would have considered.

For the same reason that Microsoft of yore would have never considered Office-online. (Why would anyone want a word processor on the web?)

Institutional blind spots are dangerous.