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Breaking up US tech companies will cede power to their Chinese competitors. Alibaba will have the advantage. And breaking up the phone company didn't improve a
by ghostcluster 6y ago
Breaking up US tech companies will cede power to their Chinese competitors. Alibaba will have the advantage.
And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baq 6y agoChinese companies aren't competitors because the playing field isn't even. For all intents and purposes Chinese companies are Chinese government.
- scollet 6y agoWhy?
- WalterBright 6y agoEvery country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Now that fractional shares can be bought with no commission, essentially everyone who wants to can invest in those FAANG companies and get returns on capital. They're better than lottery tickets (a popular "investment" for the poor).
- TMWNN 6y ago> Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States. That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
- nickpp 6y agoIt’s not a coincidence that all those are American: prosperity comes from innovation and innovation requires freedom, including economical freedom.
- Apocryphon 6y agoLumping FAANG like that (an acronym originally created by Jim Cramer to denote high-growth tech stocks) seems dubious. What does hosting a Netflix do for a country? Taiwan has TSMC (which has a comparable market cap), and it hasn't exactly transformed that nation, other than perhaps becoming a technological source of strategic importance. It seems like your post argues for their importance due to the benefits that investors can receive from them. But you always could buy blue chip stocks and $SPY.
- WalterBright 6y agoAmazon, for example, has brought enormous prosperity to Seattle. Seattle has had successive waves of prosperity driven by large companies - first there was coal, then Weyerhauser, then Boeing, then Microsoft, and now Amazon.
- Apocryphon 6y agoIt's a double-edged sword highly dependent on local governments. All the wealth that tech has brought to the Bay Area hasn't improved the dire state of housing or public infrastructure. Economic activity isn't a cure-all.
- WalterBright 6y ago> Economic activity isn't a cure-all. A flood of tax money due to Amazon has flooded into the city. If the city doesn't spend it well, they aren't going to do better if prosperity flees the city.
- Apocryphon 6y agoOn the other hand, they wouldn't have as severe a housing shortage. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zillow/2018/01/19/what-amazons-growth-has-meant-for-seattle https://www.forbes.com/sites/zillow/2018/01/19/what-amazons-...
- 6y ago
- rfreytag 6y agoBreaking up monopolies creates competition which lowers prices and fosters innovation. Alibaba is unlikely to be able to capture US regulators to quash its newly energized and more numerous US competitors.