Welcome to 2018 [LWN.net]

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 20:46 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Welcome to 2018 by felixfix
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

> they would not get away with murder if they were held accountable by lawsuits
Lawsuits? How quaint.

Look at your agreement with AT&T that you've used to buy an iPhone. And now look at the mandatory arbitration clause in it. But you're not forced to buy from AT&T, there are plenty of competitors to choose from: T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. And just 3 of these competitors also have mandatory arbitration in their contracts. Freedom!

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Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 21:58 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (6 responses)

You think 3 competitors is too few, yet you want to reduce it to 0 with the government. How consistent! What freedom!

Odds are you didn't like the results of the last US election. Now you get to cast a meaningless vote again in 3 years. There's freedom for you.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 22:24 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

This is a curious case of projection. Libertarians want to totally destroy the government and they are extrapolating that their opponents want to have the total government control.

This is not the case. Sane people want sane government regulation so that these 4 players won't screw their customers.

Direct government control makes sense only for areas with natural monopolies, where you can't feasibly have more than 1-2 competitors.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 0:18 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link] (4 responses)

Free market competition solving consumer issues only really works when there are tens or hundreds of competitors, and when none of them are dominant compared to the others.

Unfortunately that is an increasingly rare circumstance in this world where all companies try to become bigger & bigger… because that allows them to avoid most competition.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 0:55 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

Wrong. See. eg. Microsoft and Apple. There's a lot more to market conditions than just size.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 4:45 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

Both Microsoft & Apple are perfect examples of why real competition can't exist when only one or a couple companies dominate the market…

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 5, 2018 20:11 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

Government taxes and regulations are a major driver of company size increase.

Is your company paying for road transport, including taxes? Buy your own trucks. Is your company of five people having trouble following ALL of the current HR regulations for hiring and firing employees? Get big enough or get acquired. Now you have an HR and legal team that fills an entire building so you're on top of every legality. Are you providing Internet to end-users but your upstream transit costs are killing you? Buy the upstream and become Tier 1. Now YOU can charge transit fees to reach your end-users.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 6, 2018 21:00 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

In most countries HR regulations are much less strict for small companies (to the point where some companies are split up in many small divisions to avoid them).

The trend also seems to be that companies sell all their trucks/vans and hire self-employed truck/van owners instead. (It's much easier to exploit individual owner-drivers than it is to exploit hundreds of employees, I guess.)

And I do understand some of the economic reasons why companies want to become bigger & bigger (although in many cases it's also based on a cult-like belief), but that doesn't mean a small number of big companies is better for consumers or for society.