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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

It’s a big world. Does breaking up google give the Asian giants an advantage? Wonder if China breaks up their large tech companies?

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Another perspective is Google is stifling American innovation by its megalithic presence in markets. Suppressing local growth in exchange for short term profitability.

Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through

Some things can only be done at scale, or are a side effect of solving problems at scale. It’s not quite so simple as “big is bad”.

Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.

But it also works vice versa. Remember that Google literally misses its own ChatGPT while key figures literally work at Google.

These trillion-dollar companies only focus on billion-dollar markets and kill their own products that are deemed unable to scale at a planetary level

one really easy example is the AI arms race. and make no mistake, it is an arms race that matters for maintaining global American supremacy and ensuring china stays secondary. LLMs are one of the very few recent technologies where the marginal cost of a user is well above zero; they require colossal build-out of energy and compute. everyone who's done a good job with them is either a tech giant or has become one in valuation. c.f. how Google specifically has been working on TPUs for years, produced solid models with Gemini, and offers them for a tiny fraction of the cost of others. having a large team experienced with scaling stuff perhaps better than anyone else is a good thing and google keeps those people paid.

Making the argument that anti-trust is a bad idea because of geopolitics seems pretty wild to me.

Wild? Everything is just a tool. If enforcing antitrust harms national security then …

So the entire economy should be in service of national security? That’s preposterous.

I didn’t suggest the entire economy. I’m just saying it’s not _wild_ to consider national security when enforcing policies.

It does but for totally dysfunctional different reasons, Emperor Xi fears any underling doing too good as a threat to his power and cracks down on entire markets. China has been regularly engaged in this sort of outright self sabotage.

Advantage where ? Chinese tech companies are not competing outside China with one notable exception of TikTok (1) .

Global tech companies do not compete in China, the market is brutal for non Chinese companies with level of espionage, theft, sabotage that is allowed.

It is really small world for big tech, the same 5-10 companies dominate most of the world in most frequently used consumer products, and using that dominance to crowd out competitors in every new product category

(1) which is banned in few major markets like India already even if the US reverses the ban

> Chinese tech companies are not competing outside China with one notable exception of TikTok (1) .

This is absolutely not true. Most phones in Africa are Chinese now. Chinese internet companies are all over Asia outside of Japan/SK. Chinese cars (EVs, which arguably are tech), are now world-wide.

Tech companies or big tech conventionally usually mean software companies.

Every company is a tech company, if you want to be broad in your definition, they have to use tech to compete .

Actions on Chinese EV cars are either being seriously considered or already in effect in most major car markets.

All phones have been always more or less Chinese made forever including Apple, even Chinese badging is how it been for low/mid range for 10 years now, maybe Samsung does some local manufacturing in SK but no one else major does.

Budget phones or budget EVs with razor thin margins is not big tech and no DoJ action to break up Google is going to affect the way they are becoming Chinese or already are .

There is reason TikTok is the most valuable Chinese company and not a phone company, big tech have big margins and strong market effect on their own and not as a group (I.e. it would be hard to beat Chinese companies in a space , but no individual one (say byd) is irreplaceable by another Chinese company

Your words made me picture a typical American tech worker: 1.Bashes China with zero facts or sources, parroting English journalists who can’t read Chinese or grasp its nuances. 2.Lacks historical knowledge and critical thinking, clinging to a Hollywood mindset—quick to label, slow to question. 3.Worships the CIA and FBI, swallowing their propaganda while ignoring the obvious: they’re the dark forces wrecking the world 24/7.

Who is bashing China here ? You misunderstood my point

Chinese tech giants like Alibaba or Tencent or Baidu are just as good as western ones .

Their inability to go global has little do with just their technical ability to build products.

It is about whether other countries will be comfortable having what they perceive as CCP control in their markets particularly when their(ie foreign )companies do not have a level playing field in China

It is relatively easy for a country to ban a Chinese tech company or EV maker (1)because China doesn’t buy much or allow foreign companies to thrive to retaliate .

America being the biggest market and importer is the contributor to their soft power. This is what Trump is (ab)using today.

The tariffs that Trump announced recently on China is not getting a lot of attention as North American ones. The last trump administration also slapped some tariffs (not reversed by Biden) while few industries felt the pain of the reciprocal tariffs most of American industry did and will do just fine because America does not export as much to China, the people pay more of course and suffer inflation, but industry will come out broadly fine on Chinese tariffs. It is different for North America particularly Mexico due to deep integrated supply chain.

Western markets is most important not because of social cultural norms it is because it is the wealthiest today. Perhaps the global south will restore the balance this century but for next few decades that is the reality whether we like it not .

PS. My background as an Indian (or India’s complicated relationship with China) has little do with merits of this discussion, the world is not just bipolar, I am well aware that our media is just as propagandized as American or Chinese ones for that matter, but that is whole different topic .

(1) unless the country are not dependent on Chinese loans or on raw material export to China which is most of western / wealthier market

There is no such thing as a global south. There are developing countries which have a lot of differences between them. And in any case China is not a developing country but a middle income country. Many of the so called global south countries actually share a lot more traits with countries labeled as northern then other so called global south

China is not a democratic country. They don't break up companies, they forcefully remove their CEOs from their positions, or put them to jail or they can put a bullet to their head for disobeying the Party.

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