7 ms·
The point of anti-trust laws is not to punish success, but to police against an entity using their dominant position in one market to take over a different mark
by TomSawyer 9y ago
The point of anti-trust laws is not to punish success, but to police against an entity using their dominant position in one market to take over a different market.
- Silhouette 9y agoThis is an interesting question for two-sided operations like Google and Facebook. Having a near-monopoly in online search also gives Google a near-monopsony in online search advertising. Likewise for Facebook with social networking. I'm wary of introducing regulation without clear evidence of its necessity. However, there is a reasonable argument that if exploiting a monopoly to gain advantage in an adjacent market can be harmful, then exploiting a monopoly to gain an advantage in an opposing market could be harmful too. It therefore seems reasonable to ask whether the traditional applications of anti-trust principles are still appropriate for these huge modern tech markets.
- hueving 9y agoI'm sorry, but what are you suggesting is harmful here?
- Silhouette 9y agoBusinesses too small to have a real point of contact with either Google or Facebook living or dying by the whims (or mistakes) of their algorithms, for one thing. Prices paid by the advertisers more generally, for another. There are only two games in town, and both of them go out of their way to obscure what you're really getting in return for your money.
- loceng 9y agoSo what about FB replicating all of SNAP and overtaking them rapidly, taking the advertising growth market share they would of had otherwise? Time to breakup FB?
- hueving 9y agoThat just means SNAP sucked if it was that easy for Facebook to entice users. They in no way forced people to use their SNAP replica or charged less than SNAP did.
- lmm 9y agoTheir snapchat replica has less intrusive ads, perhaps because they subsidize it with the rest of their business.
- nradov 9y agoIs Snap actually in a separate market for antitrust purposes? Looks like the same market to me, but of course that decision is always a somewhat arbitrary judgment call made by the antitrust enforcers and court system.