> Here is a fun mental exercise for the reader. Imagine that you run Alphabet and want to destroy an arbitrary medium-size business that threatens you in any way. How hard would it be, considering you control pretty much all the search queries on the web and tons of other things?
Probably very easy, but consistently using this strategy would ruin my own business, in effect helping my competition.
Now imagine you're Facebook, how easy it was to rule the social media world, and because of series of equally stupid hard-balls you've mentioned, you're 5 years away from being MySpace.
> Using your example let's say that no other company can sell diapers online. That means for consumers that either don't want to or can't buy from Amazon, they are materially hurt from the lack of competition.
If a group of consumers can't or don't want to shop at Amazon, then they've just created a niche in the market (be it due to geography or anti-Amazon sentiment), that would create a demand for a diaper store that would serve those customers, because, by definition, they have just outcompeted Amazon by being more available or appealing to the consumers.
> The only possible argument here is that it's possible to have a singular organization that provides everything better than a diverse competitive market could. Neither history nor theory supports this thesis and the secondary effect on economies and political power compounds the downsides.
I believe history shows that as long as said singular organization it keeps providing everything, it will prevail (in everything). The moment it stops, it collapses and new players come in its place. This is, of course, as long as state doesn't decide to bail it out like it historically did in several heavily regulated industries, which are hard to enter partially because of said regulations. Consumers are rarely hurt in the process, as long as you let the big company take the fall, and let the new better companies grow its place once it stops delivering. If you regulate something like Search, to Google it's just extra operational costs, but as a side effect, Google becomes too big to fall, because no one else can really step in its boots anymore and enter the market.
> "Many new tech startups never get the chance to compete with the established companies, because as soon as they prove their technologies, they are acquired. But startups aren’t the only ones suffering."
Some companies are willingly selling to some other companies, so let's forcibly break some companies apart. How is former a problem, and latter, a solution?
Tim is first of all targeting the issue of privacy in that linked article (which has nothing to do with monopolies), and it does it because Apple handles that issue the best among the other big players by not being really interested in your personal data (selling $1000 iPhones is good enough). Using Tim's quote as a support for author's further claims seems manipulative. Also, note that more regulation hurts small business more (future Amazons and Googles). Large corporations are usually already profitable and can handle hiring "Privacy Engineers" or whatever the next big issue is going to be, a startup that struggles to be profitable, very often can't.
Please change my mind on that, but I don't understand the problem with the diapers store example (or any other product for that matter).
Amazon lowers the price, so the consumers will get to buy cheaper diapers (sounds good). Apparently Amazon can sell them at a very low margin, it's just choosing one that's just below what competition can offer. Then of course you have an issue with dumping (selling diapers with profit < $0), but I guess Amazon can afford to sell them at $0+eps profit, so its end game is to sell diapers at a lowest price to outcompete diaper stores on a crazy low margin. Well, maybe there won't be online diapers stores anymore. Most likely Amazon will then bump up the price back.. Well, so the diaper stores will appear again (if the new bumped-up price is above a margin at which an individual store can again operate). What will Amazon do then? Go back to step 1? Great, more cheap diapers at "eps" margin. This, of course, requires the third party stores to have low "startup" costs.
And maybe the bottom-line here is, that there is not going to be diapers.com and alike anymore. Well, maybe online diapers store is not a branch of industry one can enter in 2018 and expect to win big just by having a nicer website, without proposing something truly innovative that a giant like Amazon cannot offer (see how dollar shave club competed with Gilette/Wilkinson etc.)
> [Referring to Amazon] "Its owner should have his immoral hoard of wealth forcibly expropriated by the state before his power grows so great that all of society is warped by it. Jeff Bezos’s money should immediately be put to use helping the public; (...)"
As someone that once lived under a system, which used to do that in eastern Europe, it is absolutely bizarre to see this being written by an American journalist. I guess you don't know how good you have it until you lose it.
It probably isn’t but it’s safe to assume that this location was at least around the median in terms of fire risk (this location had probably better infrastructure than the average Brazilian city), so the fact that there might be less risky locations doesn’t change much since you’ll then have places with higher risk, where the collection will have burned down even sooner. Even if you knew the best location with the least hazard, optimally you would still want to move all collections there anyway.
The strategy didn’t work since any strategy was likely deemed for failure due lack of funding, not because it was suboptimal.
That's not true and what they did was probably optimal. The probability of losing the whole collection over time is the same. By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N). Moreover, by having it centralized you can reduce costs, hence save money and use it to lower the risk of fire.
What they did by centralizing the collection was the best thing they could do to save it, but apparently they didn't even have money to protect a single museum from fire hazard. Spread the collection around the country and you don't even have money/people for proper maintenance and protection against theft in each individual location.
It wouldn't collapse for those that did not gamble, why should they pick up the tab? What later stops the gamblers from gambling again once the non-gambles pay off their debt, other than outright ban of gambling. Then replace 'gambling' with any voluntary risk vs gain activity.
> If those investments fail, you will now probably have to use government funds to bail them out in some way
Why? Should I then expect the government to bail me out after I lose all of my money in blackjack, provided that sufficient amount of people do the same.
Sadly, the current party seems to be on the side of stepping in and bailing people out. Once in the instance of mortgages in Swiss Franc, which were taken in '00s (CHF went up significantly several years after, raising people's morgage almost 200%), and secondly in the case of a big precious metals investment scam (Google "Poland Amber Gold").
Those government interventions will not come without costs. A direct one resulting in forcing the taxpayers, which were responsible with their money, to reimburse those who were willing to risk taking a 30-year loan in a foreign currency, or those hoping for high profits from a precious metals investment by a company that existed for less than 2 years on the market. Another cost, which I would argue is a more dangerous one, is destroying fiscal responsibility in the mentality of people. In case of something like bitcoin it can only lead to three outcomes for the ruling party: a) the government regulates/defames or bans bitcoin, b) government accepts that it will need to bail people out at some point once a sufficient amount of "victims" complain, c) it loses the next elections to a party which will promise a bitcoin bail-out
> (...) to try to educate it's indirect users on good and bad risks to take to try to make the country as a whole more competitive. (...) Given that attribution would probably have reduced it's effectiveness, I can see why the country would want it without attribution.
I agree with the educational part, but not so much with the argument for concealing the attribution. The moment someone spills the beans, the smell of "propaganda" can have an opposite effect, i.e., "they did that in secret, because they want to keep taxing you through inflation, that's how powerful bitcoin is".
Too bad the author did not mention Lightning Network. The issue covered in this article is one of the reasons LN was chosen as the scaling solution instead of the block size increase (i.e. bcash).
Choose two: a) free* b) reliable c) universal
* not counting ads.