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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

Like a lumber mill that buys logs from a logging company? Who subcontracts to individual fallers? Who buy their chainsaws from a chainsaw company, their fuel from a petrochemical company? No business isn't entirely dependent on third parties. That's what it means to exist in a healthy economy.

A "farm-to-table" megacorp that owns everything from the source of every raw material through to the finished product is a nightmare, an entity that needs to be reigned in and broken up. Capitalism is a competitive game, but a game that can never be allowed to end.

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But what about the digital economy? It's interesting that the length of the supply chain for digital goods and knowledge work is nothing like physical goods. Google, Microsoft, and Apple are end to end, don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to (until LLMs, anyway, except Google).

What is a "digital economy"? There is only one economy as far as I know. Division of company inputs into software and non-software is arbitrary and has no merit as far as I can see.

>> don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to.

I am rather sure that Google is heavily reliant on Microsoft and Apple to produce the operating systems used on devices that are in turn used to view Google's ads. And Microsoft is heavily reliant on hardware manufacturers (firmware is also software) to make the machines that Windows lives inside. And Apple is reliant upon a thousand and one companies that enable the innumerable mobile networks, which include many layers of non-apple software.

They are not reliant on them second-to-second. If anthropic tells these businesses they can't use anymore, or price hike, or ... then those businesses are kaput, right that second.

Plus you can bet your firstborn everything passes through the NSA first. So seems like a spectacularly bad idea, especially for .eu business.

There's no "right this second" way to kaput Google, not even if you're Microsoft.

The difference is that the lumber mill isn't giving the logging company all the information required to run a lumber mill and the logging company isn't turning around and selling said information to anyone for $200/mo.

In my scenario, the only way anthropic and openai are profitable entities if they directly absorb the capacities of the companies, the same way Amazon "basics" exist to absorb the generic consumer product levels.

I'm not pointing out they'll take your secrets and sell them to the competition. I'm pointing out they will _be_ your competition. The same way Amazon basics competes with it's business interests.

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