okay
> There’s zero benefit to consumers, and a lot of harm.
There's a ton of potential societal benefit in centralization and/or monopoly in theory. There's also a ton of potential downside. What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?
You could argue that features can make it easier across products, but each product would be big enough on their own to develop these features at little cost compared to their income. Apart from that there's no potential upside I can see for a user to have these products under one company.
The same applies to Giphy. Right now, messenger companies don't own Gif companies and it's still very easy to use them together. I don't see the benefit here for a user to have them owned by the same company.
Common-ish arguments for monopolies, as applied to this situation:
* potentially the interoperability you indicate
* infrastructure investment leading to stability
* similarly: best in class client side software
* security / privacy guarantees (yes. I know, ironic, etc. but the fully distributed multi-company alternative is likely worse on these dimensions)
* single point of accountability for the state and law enforcement. (yes. not likely a HN concern. Still valuable to the state and potentially regular consumers.)
* general pro monopoly argument: fewer resources are wasted in competition, and so can be applied to product development and research. i.e. bell labs
IDK how I feel the scales tip in this case, but treating it as cut and dry feels a bit naive.
Strong +1 on the ensuing twisted incentives.
If anything, being a centralised conglomerate makes them less stable, less secure. And with less competition, they actually become more wasteful.
I.e. It’s nontrivial to be more wasteful than it would be to have multiple teams duplicating the same product.
(Strong disagree on your suggestion that the centralisation generally makes them less stable/secure, but granted on the tail risks.)
You are arguing for Central Planning. You can't be pro-free market and pro monopoly.
At least government monopoly is theoretically accountable to the voters.
Downsides:
* Higher risk - a bigger database to attack.
* A very big single point of failure
* Slows down innovation
* Less private
Upsides (for society):
* ???
Usually we dont ask "What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?"