Ask HN: Should big tech companies be considered monopolies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should big tech companies be considered monopolies?

Facebook, Google, and Apple have immense power.

Together, they're essential to modern life. You really can't live without them.

If Google decides to shut down your gmail account, your life is impacted in a big way.

Apple's app store is responsible for the well being of 10s if not 100s of thousands of businesses.

Facebook controls the majority's perception of the media such that it may have changed the election with fake news stories.

These companies have more power than Bell, Standard Oil, and certainly more than Microsoft had. It's increasingly becoming apparent that they can negatively impact the lives of millions.

What can we do about it?

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At least they're pretty much equivalent in sizes and competing with each other. Imagine if Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple merge into one big corp. That would be monopoly. There would be no competition at all. But that won't happen, because the government would intervene. So our current situation is somewhat OK.

Google has a monopoly on search, Facebook has a monopoly on social media, Microsoft has a monopoly on OS (this is contentious generally but Linux isn't a realistic choice for most people and Apple only releases their OS on special hardware that is way out of the price range for most people). Very few large tech companies seem to have lots of competition over their core business and honestly if it was that competative in the end you probably wouldn't be seeing as much VC money as you have.

Yes, they are monopolies. I call them technopolies (see Urban Dictionary definition, the Neil Postman definition is wrong).

They should have already been regulated as monopolies.

But the long term solution is decentralization technologies that will put them out of business. See https://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization

Google I understand, but how exactly can you not live without Apple products?

Think of all the hundreds of thousands of developers who have put hours and hours into creating livings out of selling items on the app store. You'd be taking away a large amount of peoples living.

Are there really hundreds of thousands of developers who make a living out of an app store?

Considering that there are ~2 million apps* in both the Play and App stores I would say yes. Also considering for many people in the US their phone is their primary means of accessing the internet it's extremely likely that hundreds of thousands of people (not just devs, business people, designers and community teams as well) rely on the app they work on being in one or both of those stores.

* according to the first result in Google.

Don't use their services, be like Richard Stallman

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