Anti-trust needs to come back in a big way to a Teddy Roosevelt / FDR level. Monopoly/oligopoly that causes too much concentration should be subject to regular anti-trust.
The biggest needing breakups are:
- ISPs / telecoms
- Banks
- Food supply
ISPs / telecom should be first, the 2017 push to remove net neutrality even with clear violations [1], privacy protections and focus on ad networks [2], data caps, throttling, prioritization and more are unforgivable. The network is a utility, it needs strong liability behind that. I'd rather the lines be run by power companies and in many places like Phoenix SRP runs all the fiber anyways [3]. Cox only ran lines when Google Fiber was here. All Cox does is overload nodes and upload is severely limited as well as prioritization is going overboard and ending up with dropped packets and a horrible QoE. While these systems have a decent QoS, the QoE is going down immensely. There are lots more things they are doing like trying to get their modems in while having access to remotely install firmware on approved but not rented modems and limiting/throttling by device when you get their shared modem/router that they can see every device.
"too big to fail banks" next which are a national security issue almost at this point. Mind blowing after the Great Recession that we let the banks handle this stimulus as a gatekeeper. The GR bubble was caused by mortgage backed securities that went into cause a credit crunch. Now we got whistleblowers coming out about commercial mortgage backed securities [4]. It is going to get bad.
With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors [5].
Harvard Business Review recently raised the alarm about too much consolidation called "The High Price of Efficiency" and how there should be a 'rethinking efficiency' to reduce concentration [6].
> "Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder."
You can have too much "efficiency", it leads to stagnation and monopolies/oligopolies which stop innovating and turn to rent-seeking. Ultimately it leads to less innovation, less products, less jobs, monoculture, higher prices and missed opportunities when there is efficient competition but not super efficient markets. We need companies doing the same things and finding new ways to do things otherwise product development and research and development stop. The sales/marketing/finance takes over then from the product/engineering/creative people and we all lose.
Here's a great quick point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [7] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
The market is like a garden. The seeds and smaller plants need help, the overgrown and large plants should be harvested and culled back so it doesn't take over the garden and then the midsize plants flourish. Our market garden is in a state of overgrowth and the rest of the crops can't survive.
What happens when the overgrowth is taken over and efficiently worked out competition and created stagnation? How will there be competition in an oligopoly that is no longer US owned? It is a national security issue as well as a fair market matter.
It is in there under the "With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors." [1]
Too much consolidation and waste due to super efficiency that is inflexible like code that is too coupled and specialized for a certain cpu over being flexible.
Right now pork is being wasted as slaughterhouses and meat packing has been reduced dramatically in the US since the 90s, larger facilities, less of them. Too efficient that it created a security issue and potential national security attack vector. Everything is not as localized, so there are choke points in our food supply that become massive backlogs.
>In 1977, the four largest meat processing firms constituted just 25% of the market, claims Bond. Today, they control 85% of the slaughter market, as well as some 35% of cattle ranches and around 65% of the entire chicken industry, he said.
> Since 1990, the number of slaughter houses, excluding poultry, has declined by 46%, from 2,709 establishments to just 1,461 establishments.
The biggest needing breakups are:
- ISPs / telecoms
- Banks
- Food supply
ISPs / telecom should be first, the 2017 push to remove net neutrality even with clear violations [1], privacy protections and focus on ad networks [2], data caps, throttling, prioritization and more are unforgivable. The network is a utility, it needs strong liability behind that. I'd rather the lines be run by power companies and in many places like Phoenix SRP runs all the fiber anyways [3]. Cox only ran lines when Google Fiber was here. All Cox does is overload nodes and upload is severely limited as well as prioritization is going overboard and ending up with dropped packets and a horrible QoE. While these systems have a decent QoS, the QoE is going down immensely. There are lots more things they are doing like trying to get their modems in while having access to remotely install firmware on approved but not rented modems and limiting/throttling by device when you get their shared modem/router that they can see every device.
"too big to fail banks" next which are a national security issue almost at this point. Mind blowing after the Great Recession that we let the banks handle this stimulus as a gatekeeper. The GR bubble was caused by mortgage backed securities that went into cause a credit crunch. Now we got whistleblowers coming out about commercial mortgage backed securities [4]. It is going to get bad.
With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors [5].
Harvard Business Review recently raised the alarm about too much consolidation called "The High Price of Efficiency" and how there should be a 'rethinking efficiency' to reduce concentration [6].
> "Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder."
You can have too much "efficiency", it leads to stagnation and monopolies/oligopolies which stop innovating and turn to rent-seeking. Ultimately it leads to less innovation, less products, less jobs, monoculture, higher prices and missed opportunities when there is efficient competition but not super efficient markets. We need companies doing the same things and finding new ways to do things otherwise product development and research and development stop. The sales/marketing/finance takes over then from the product/engineering/creative people and we all lose.
Here's a great quick point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [7] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
The market is like a garden. The seeds and smaller plants need help, the overgrown and large plants should be harvested and culled back so it doesn't take over the garden and then the midsize plants flourish. Our market garden is in a state of overgrowth and the rest of the crops can't survive.
What happens when the overgrowth is taken over and efficiently worked out competition and created stagnation? How will there be competition in an oligopoly that is no longer US owned? It is a national security issue as well as a fair market matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our...
[3] https://srptelecom.com/darkfiber/networkmap.aspx
[4] https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...
[5] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
[6] https://hbr.org/2019/01/rethinking-efficiency
[7] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...