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FredPret

“As America slouches toward plutocracy”

JD Rockefeller once was worth 2% of the US GDP.

The “sky-is-falling, everything is getting worse” narrative gets eyeballs but isn’t true.

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Rockefeller and standard oil was a big problem, and required large-scale government anti-trust actions to be fixed.

Do you see similar things happening now?

Can someone explain why someone who isn't Zuckerberg would argue that Facebook isn't a monopoly?

They don't have dibs on natural resources like oil or physical space like with railroads. In theory skillful people can create better analogues of Facebook and Instagram that would serve less ads, be more meaningfully engaging, collect less data etc.

That makes sense.

If you expand "natural" resource to include something pertinent to network effects (e.g. human attention is a resource) then I see that as the beginning of an argument in the opposite direction.

They don't have an ownership right on attention. Railway company might have some unique long term lease on the land. Each user can extract their data with takeout, delete account and if they must – use another service.

They have dibs on a natural resource called personal data.

Do they? I'd wager Google knows a great deal more about me than Facebook.

Maybe.

In that case I must be a very special case or they are absolutely clueless or something.

I see nothing but idiotic ideas coming out from Googles knowledge of my data:

- absurdly irrelevant and even insulting ads. I can easily count on one hand the useful ones I have got (one for a local shop and one for Jetbrains products I think).

- Google Now suggesting in the middle of the night that I should text the boss two levels above me or call a random girl I once helped with a computer(!)

Same. I think these AI companies make too many assumptions on what people want and need. It's like people are lab mice they watch in terms of some experiment, but don't communicate with beside asking to name interests like technology or cryptocurrency and rate the quality of the call.

I agree in some respects. It's hard to leave Google and Facebook because their accounts are used to login to other sites and services. Also when you buy apps and switch mobile OS you don't have a right for a free copy of this app from a different store, i.e. not real ownership because your app is tethered to the store.

Because it isn’t.

Anyone can open a social media site. Anyone can use it. Anyone can leave it.

Being where everyone wants to be isn’t a monopoly when innumerable other venues are no harder to visit.

If network effect means quality or “price” (in terms of what you trade, whether or not its money, for the experience) changes don’t lead to substitution between the dominant site and other sites, it absolutely is a monopoly, even if it would be equally easy to go to other sites. Monopoly is an empiricial, behavioral question of substitution between notional competitors, but not abstract question of available alternatives.

I'd say not monopoly, but anticompetitive behaviour like leveraging company's size, reach and cash to "forcefully" acquire competitors.

Standard Oil was split as I recall. Similar action is geared towards Amazon, Google, Apple and FB

'by action' you mean it as been considered or is a 0< possiblity. That is along way from anything actually happening.

I mean various antitrust court cases and government hearings. Like recent Apple vs Epic.

Yes it was split. One of the child companies was called Esso, after the acronym S.O.

Fair enough. I know I’m personally not buying anything from Amazon anymore. Just saying it’s not been a one-way inevitable downhill slide like some people make out.

By the time standard oil was broken up, it had already dropped from >90% to around 60% market share and was dropping fast.

The government intervention just artificially sped up a process that was already happening.

See [1] for a good summary. Then pair it with [2]. The full picture is, as usual, more complex than a catchy title can summarize, but the trends are pretty clear. If you're in the top 20% of earners, things are improving. If you're not, things are generally stagnant or getting worse. So we're heading for something that's kind of plutocracy and kind of a class-based system of "haves" and "have nots".

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/251

Plutocracy is the natural state of a capitalist society. But America managed to break out of it briefly in roughly the 1940s-70s period, and has since regressed to the mean. So in a "what your grandparents remember" sense, things have definitely gotten worse.

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