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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

I find comments like yours baffling. The basic tenement of capitalism, as worshipped in US, is that it needs competition to function. If a monopolist prevents competition from functioning (either by hiding their products on the largest search engine on earth, lowering prices under profitable margins or other tactics used by such entities) capitalism degenerates into socialism led by a corporation instead of state. It ceases to function and benefit anyone.

So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?

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I'm always amazed by that thinking as well.

I think at some point in the discussion, some people have tried to redefine "monopoly" as "state-sanctioned monopoly" and declare everything else fair game as long as the evil government is not involved... Apparently you can get surprisingly far before the logic breaks down.

>So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?

Because it's not the government's job to unclog the market. It's the entrepreneur's opportunity to disrupt the market and kick Google's ass.

When you come down from the cloud-land of capitalist heaven you will find this is not even remotely what happens.

Capitalism is inherently anti-competitive. Larger established companies have more power than the idealized "entrepreneur" that libertarians like to posit. If a competitor appears they can simply force them to shutdown, via dumping, via legal harassment, or simply by virtue of being much larger and being able to do everything more efficiently and with larger margins. Government regulation is needed to prevent monopolies. This is self-evident.

So if a private company skips regulations, it's not the government's job to enforce them?

One way of looking at corporations is islands of central planning in a sea of market forces. It is not always entirely obvious which functions should be optimally bundled together inside corporations. This is why you can get a lot of controversy around these decisions.

The marketshare of a company(at a point in time) does not determine whether a business is a monopoly or not, high/low barriers to entry in the particular industry do.

There are multiple search engines providing the same service that Google does and the cost of switching is so negligible as to be almost non-existent.

While I generally appreciate the EU's approach towards protecting the consumer's best interests, this just reeks of making up excuses to extort money from a highly successful company just because they can get away with it.

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