Hacker News

Capital Wants a Monopoly(larrysalibra.com)

15 points by larrysalibra 18 hours ago | 10 comments

it was not so long ago that TR busted trusts, but the time is overdue for history to repeat itself.

It is called feudalism. You have lords owning the land and everybody else needs to rent it. That is what capital is afterwards. You will own nothing, fight.

[–] steveBK123 17 hours ago

Right it started with SaaS and content subscriptions. We also have all the gamification, enshittification and up-selling in the physical-world Uber-For-X business models.

They've made all the delivery slower and added an option for you to pay $5 more to make it arrive at the speed it used to. We've jacked up fees and added a monthly subscription that reduces some of those fees back down.

As they take a larger cut from restaurants, many have increased in-app prices so you are paying multiple premiums&fees.

First non-cherry picked example I checked first restaurant in-app: $16 dish is $19.20 in-app , $5 delivery fee (flat-ish per order), $2 marketplace fee (scales with order size) to make it $26.80 pre-tax. +70% increase on direct retail in-restaurant price.

[–] ForHackernews 17 hours ago

Bizarre take:

> The USA needs an equivalent of China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). This regulatory body generally prevents this tech platform monpoly nonsense

I guess the author is completely unfamiliar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

[–] steveBK123 17 hours ago

Maybe author means we should actually enforce our antitrust laws that are on the books, on their merits.

Rather than the multi-decade consensus "if it lowers consumer prices in short term its ok" or 2024+ "if they donate to my ballroom, they get a pass".

[–] anonymous_user9 14 hours ago

The author's argument is that the current system in the US isn't working, so we do need an equivalent of a system that actually works.

[–] pimlottc 16 hours ago

Note that the author specified a regulatory agency, not a law. Laws are great, but they need strong and vigilant agents to enforce them.

[–] wahern 16 hours ago

You didn't need a centralized regulatory agency to enforce a law. Even federal laws, if they're written so, can be prosecuted by individual states or even individual persons. Some aspects of antitrust law already work this way.

Doing so can prevent regulatory capture and shelter enforcement from the vicissitudes of politics. It also doesn't require maintaining a government workforce. OTOH, you have to be careful what you ask for. Unless a law is very narrowly tailored then ubiquitous enforcement can have it's own problems, e.g. CEQA.

[–] dcrazy 14 hours ago

The Sherman Antitrust Act specifically provides individuals harmed by a monopoly a cause of action to sue in federal court.

[–] grafmax 11 hours ago

Megacorps have endless budgets for this sort of thing. The deck is heavily stacked. What's to gain by pretending it ain't so?