Integration and Monopoly

Opinion | The Monopolization of America (Published 2018)

In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show.

Anti-trust

Technology markets, and others that share their strong economies of scale , naturally tend to evolve into oligopolies, if not outright monop...

Antitrust, the App Store, and Apple

Apple’s case before the Supreme Court is about standing; Apple has a strong case. That, though, doesn’t mean the App Store isn’t a monopoly — and that Apple isn’t increasing…

Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly

Facebook gave one of the worst keynotes in a long time: there was no vision, just the adoption of Snap’s. It’s the inevitable outcome of a monopoly.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”

A few weeks ago, Italy fined Apple and Samsung €15 million for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones. The antitrust regulators allege that both companies pushed users to download software that slowed phone performance, forcing customers to buy replacement phones sooner.

Platform Monopolies - AVC

There’s an article in the NY Times Sunday Business Section today that lays out a very important question we have all been dancing around but will increasingly be dealing with. The article is nominally about Amazon’s fight with Hachette but it is really about internet platforms and monopolies. The author of the NY Times piece […]

Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!

Open Up Vs Break Up - AVC

There have been many calls to break up the large Internet monopolies; Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Breaking up a large monopoly feels like a very 19th/20th century move to me. I would prefer that politicians and policy makers think about opening up as the better intervention. A good way to explain this is to […]

The strength of a monopoly can be guessed at by calling customer support

If you were an alien hovering above planet earth on a quick visit and trying to find out quickly which were its most dominant companies, you could probably do worse than try to reach their customer…

How Big Tech Becomes Ungovernable

Big Tech companies like Google, SpaceX, and Meta aren't just monopolies—they're becoming ungovernable through tech extensivity. Why €4B in fines went uncollected.

Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More

Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and

The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy

The pursuit of monopoly has led Silicon Valley astray.

The Moat or the Commons — Warman Notes

American capital financed AI on the assumption it would be the next great monopoly. Open-weight models are commoditizing the capability that monopoly was supposed to protect. The collision between the two now defines the direction of the U.S. AI industry — and the country.

Public Monopolies Are a Good Thing

Private monopolies are rightly criticized for being inefficient and unaccountable. But public monopolies are a different story — we should loudly and proudly say that democratically controlled public monopolies are a positive good.