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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

What do you think innovators will feel when they see the government breaking up a private company? Do you think they’ll be more or less motivated to create one to meet the same fate down the road in the unlikely case of success, after immeasurable difficulties and struggle?

Ever heard of second order effects and chilling effect of regulation?

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"More room for us to grow."

Grow - why?! So we can be the next company squished by the bureaucrats?

The next company to devise new ways to outwit antitrust action via loophole legalities devised by their armies of lawyers funded by all of the money they've made operating in the competitive space cleared out by antitrust action.

> armies of lawyers

Which no startups have. So, antitrust favors incumbents, of course.

> money they've made operating in the competitive space cleared out

Again, not startups. It’s incumbents that take advantage of opportunities like that.

Startups do not have to worry about such issues until they themselves become incumbents, which they do after the previous incumbents were brought low by antitrust action.

> they themselves become incumbents […] after the previous incumbents were brought low by antitrust action

Haha, you’ve never built a startup have you? Try it and let me know how easy it is to become incumbent. :)

Antitrust solves this

No, it doesn’t.

Besides, a vicious cycle in which antitrust creates monopolies to only take them down later is a nightmare for consumers.

Seems to have worked out okay in tech, because we have the benefit of technological progress. WinTel dominance is moot because smartphone is the name of the game, and MS was unable to execute. The Mac and Linux were also able to catch up in the meantime, even though Windows is still numerically dominant on desktop.

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