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Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

This anti-big-tech hysteria in the US is dangerous. Applying early 20th antitrust thinking to modern tech companies is short sighted and doesn't show the whole picture. These American big tech companies that people like Steve Bannon and Lina Khan want to split up have been responsible for not only the impressive US GDP and wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 financial crisis but also for much of the rest of the world's wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 crisis.

Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.

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Inequality is growing massively, it is also not necessarily the best use of capital, whilst this growth may be big, if it were not so concentrated it would likely be even larger. Concentration of capital leads to inefficiency, a small but relevant example, large mansions and super yachts. The marginal propensity to consume also needs to be considered, we live in a demand driven world.

Indeed. I'd argue that failing to apply robust antitrust enforcement (as the US hasn't in the last 20 years) is short-sighted.

It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.

Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.

> Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.

This doesn't change the fact that they cause societal problems operating at this scale. Should we be building their vision of the future or societies consensus vision of it?

I'd respectfully disagree.

The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.

The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).

It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.

E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok

I'm not saying it's all positive. I'm countering something that says it's all negative. And TikTok is more like Facebook than a small startup.

TikTok is more like Facebook now, but the genesis of it in Douyin isn't something Facebook would have considered.

For the same reason that Microsoft of yore would have never considered Office-online. (Why would anyone want a word processor on the web?)

Institutional blind spots are dangerous.

Driving high levels of the total returns off of a handful of advertisement companies doesn’t seem good or sustainable IMO. But

In that regard the Danish pension funds are actually playing it safer than our neighbors. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the largest of its kind in the world, is 40% US equities (read: US tech stocks) and 10% US private equity (read: more US tech).

Some Norwegians are starting to be concerned but only because they think Trump will seize their assets.

"monopolies are good because line goes up"

>monopolies

Where exactly? They lose market share to every new AI wrapper app and most young people are on the Chinese video app.

>are good because line goes up

The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work when we are actually suddenly in a "line goes down" situation and it clearly sucks.

The line going down is just a return to reality hopefully. So many vastly over valued tech stocks and tech adjacent stocks.

> The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work

No it still works, because "but make a lot of money!" is _never_ an acceptable argument for anything. It may be a supplemental argument, but you need something else to be the foundation. Making a lot of money doesn't explain why something is good or why we should do it over other things.

I mean, we can make a lot of money through theft, or selling tobacco, maybe legalizing heroin. But those things are bad.

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