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Comment by markkanof | Hacker News Reader

Your not wrong, but it's also a bit depressing that we live in a world where giant companies can just wait until they see something becoming successful enough and then use their essentially unlimited resources to copy it and put the original creator out of business.

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Tech was exciting for a time, but human history is full of gatekeepers demanding their rents and only allowing others in their turf if they aren't too threatening.

We've been living through the good parts. It is only going to get more "normal".

Think different.

Thanks for this comment. It saddens me whenever I hear normality is the gold standard, because what is normal?

That seems to make the assumption that creative ideas and experimentation are more important or more valuable for product innovation than having the resources and scale to actually mass-produce or "productize" new innovations. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but I think it's easy to tip too far toward valuing "being the first to do something" and not recognizing the value of the other part.

The Sherman-Antitrust Act recognizes that value and how power can be abused in absence of that value.

This argument seems more relevant to intellectual property laws. The complaint was about Apple stealing ideas from their app developer community.

Isn't the idea these days that you make a successful startup in the hopes that it gets acquired by a giant company, as it would be more economical to buy their competition out, with their customers and IP, than replicate it themselves?

When the platform owner can kill your product with a flick of a switch, your negotiating position is weak

If FAANG does it better then why does it matter? If their business was successful enough to get copied by FAANG then they probably already made enough money to move onto something else.

Patents provide one way of stopping this kind of predation, but everybody hates patents so we have to pretend otherwise.

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