What can be done about mega-corporations that are too big to fail?

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

Disney, Amazon, Microsoft, Blackrock, Google and of course many others. What can be done about them? How do you realistically break them apart? Won't any such efforts get lobbied?

[gondrin]

Disney, Amazon, Microsoft, Blackrock, Google and of course many others. What can be done about them? How do you realistically break them apart? Won't any such efforts get lobbied?

First, you have to prove they are so large that they can stifle competition. You can possibly state that with Alphabet with the fact they are in almost everything net based. However, the rest aren't even top in their respective categories. Disney, while very large, has competition from all sorts of media companies. Microsoft is only big in the home PC market and while they make a lot of money from enterprise, they are most definitely not the largest there. The vast majority of data goes through some form of Unix or Linux based OS. Amazon is the same. While large, they aren't the largest retailer(that would be Wal-Mart), they are the largest cloud based datacenter though.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be something done as far as how Amazon directly copies competitors goods and then undercuts them or the fact Blackrock is pretty much invested in nearly every company under the sun. It is just they are not the same as Standard Oil, US Steel or AT&T when they were broken up.

[Shadowferal]

This touches on politics...

House Bills Seek to Break Up Amazon and Other Big Tech Companies

It hasn't gotten far.

[PC2]

What can be done? We can and should celebrate organizations when they achieve things at larger and larger scales. That's a good sign and not a problem.

[Shadowferal]

What can be done? We can and should celebrate organizations when they achieve things at larger and larger scales. That's a good sign and not a problem.

And again, showing all the embarrassing level of uneducation you have.
Just stop posting. You'll give everyone the impression of sagacity by simply being silent.

[PC2]

And again, showing all the embarrassing level of uneducation you have.
Just stop posting. You'll give everyone the impression of sagacity by simply being silent.

Most of our politicians agree with me in general though, they agree that corporations should be allowed to keep growing in scale. It would be irrational to say that there's a certain limit to how big corporations should be and that they need to be broken up at some point. Unless you can make a convincing argument to the contrary.

[gondrin]

Most of our politicians agree with me in general though, they agree that corporations should be allowed to keep growing in scale. It would be irrational to say that there's a certain limit to how big corporations should be and that they need to be broken up at some point. Unless you can make a convincing argument to the contrary.

There is a point where a company is so large they have the ability to distort the economy at large in a negative way by their actions. We seen it with the Banking crash of 2008. AT&T was at that point in the 80s. The other problem comes with like how Wal-Mart got to the point they were so large that they could basically force businesses to close because they would cut prices so low that businesses couldn't compete. Not that they didn't want to, they just couldn't because Wal-Mart could buy in massive numbers and move massive number of items while making only pennies of profit because of how large they were. This is anti-competitive behavior.

I am for the free market. However, after a business or an entity gets beyond a certain size and have so much of the market, the free market breaks down.

EDIT: Clarifying a statement.

[Mayhem]

Most of our politicians agree with me in general though, they agree that corporations should be allowed to keep growing in scale. It would be irrational to say that there's a certain limit to how big corporations should be and that they need to be broken up at some point. Unless you can make a convincing argument to the contrary.

I see you ignore reality at every step of the way.

OT
Break them up, it's been done in the past, it can be done again, not that hard.

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

There is a point where a company is so large they have the ability to distort the economy at large in a negative way by their actions. We seen it with the Banking crash of 2008. AT&T was at that point in the 80s. The other problem comes with like how Wal-Mart got to the point they were so large that they could basically force businesses to close because they would cut prices so low that businesses couldn't compete. Not that they didn't want to, they just couldn't because Wal-Mart could buy in massive numbers and move massive number of items for pennies because of how large they were. This is anti-competitive behavior.

I am for the free market. However, after a business or an entity gets beyond a certain size and have so much of the market, the free market breaks down.

Not just the economy but the functioning of democracy.

[Shadowferal]

Most of our politicians agree with me in general though, they agree that corporations should be allowed to keep growing in scale. It would be irrational to say that there's a certain limit to how big corporations should be and that they need to be broken up at some point. Unless you can make a convincing argument to the contrary.

History, facts, truth, all of which are all against which you refuse to admit they're relevant. Indeed, you make the same bullshit claim that they aren't relevant. Just so you can live comfortably in your denial and narrative bubble. Your self-delusion refuse to consider why things happen; why income tax was created, why food and drug laws were created, why antitrust and monopoly laws were created, why labor laws were created.

Now run away.

[Draco-Onis]

Most of our politicians agree with me in general though, they agree that corporations should be allowed to keep growing in scale.

Gee I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that said politicians are getting bribed I mean receiving "donations" and favors including future employment from said giant corporations.

[Shadowferal]

Gee I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that said politicians are getting bribed I mean receiving "donations" and favors including future employment from said giant corporations.

He always claims some airy authority that rarely exists.
And then there was this gem;

Source? You know people can live on less than $5 an hour right? What you actually want is a 'comfortable' wage, not a "livable" wage.

Most economists and politicians agree with me regarding the negative effects of a high minimum wage. Yet we're all uneducated.

The first part was the usual idiocy that he has zero evidence in the US today.
The 2nd part again claims an authority that only a libertarian would agree with...which means it's an authority only to them...but to common sense, not so much. And that of course means a lack of education.

[Forogil]

To me the question both the question and the proposed remedies (based on what worked before) are wrong, and based on a bad analysis.

'Too big to fail' would mean a company that is essential for everyone and we couldn't let it fail. A bank can be in that category - and possibly BlackRock, but I don't see any realistic scenario where BlackRock just goes belly-up with all its assets.

If AWS (Amazon), Google, or Disney disappeared the competitors would step in fairly quickly - and I don't see any reason for the government to prevent that. That is the case even in smaller markets where some companies are almost totally dominant - like LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft). From an economic perspective one could argue that all of them are in contestable markets.

The problem I see is more a case of 'Too big to succeed' (well - perhaps that's taking it too far), where the problem is that when the companies are successful they become natural monopolies due to the network effect (LinkedIn is the most obvious example - why would you want to only be on the smaller competitor instead? do you honestly think you are that unique?). (A separate issue is that they are 'Too big to tax'; but there's some global effort regarding a minimum 15% corporate tax.)

Historically companies were split up - that misses the point that today many of them are dominant because of network effects and economies of scale; and geography is fairly meaningless - Google Search West Coast and Google Search East Coast wouldn't make much sense - and splitting AWS in the same way makes even less sense.

And the same effect that made one dominant would likely mean that one of them would be dominant again in a few years. Splitting companies in other ways could create even worse problem, splitting Twitter in Left-Wing and Right-Wing would just create worse echo-chambers, and to me the split of streaming movie-platforms into Netflix, HBO, Disney+, AppleTV, etc doesn't really seem good for me and other consumers (especially as they mostly insist on subscription models - but on the other hand a month subscription is a cheaper than renting a dvd-box for a season of a tv-show).

Regulating the markets the companies operate in may be a remedy (as splitting them doesn't make sense), but it takes considerably more care - and is also complicated by the fact that they operate globally, and different countries have different ideas of free speech, data protection, and other issues. And it is not always clear if it benefits the customers - many US companies block access from the EU since they don't want to deal with GDPR; that just causes fragmentation.

[Endus]

I think the focus on size misses the real issue; that being the existence of oligarchs exploiting these massive companies for personal political gain.

A lot of these companies, like Youtube, are massive because of individual choice; the size of their audience and content creation is the draw, and if you tried to split it up into Atube and Btube, everyone would end up picking one of the two and re-inflating it, unless you put in hard regional separators which is challenging in a digital world. As long as the company isn't engaging in market manipulations that limit competition directly, I don't have a problem with them outcompeting by virtue of their size alone, when that size is the appeal.

Most of the rest, where they do get abusive, is cases like Amazon's harsh employee requirements, the whole "peeing in bottles" and "burnout" stuff we've been hearing about. That's due to the decision-makers, the oligarchs, not respecting the staff and extracting profit from them the same way an oil company does an oil deposit.

Shifting to a worker-based ownership system makes it nearly impossible for workers to end up being exploited, since it's the workers themselves making those decisions. It also means the massive amount of profits these megacorporations make is going largely to their massive employee base, boosting all their incomes rather than letting one tick of a human being at the very top bleed off the vast majority of that profit all to themselves.

The problem with Amazon is not Amazon. The problem is Jeff Bezos.

[Doctor Amadeus]

What can be done? We can and should celebrate organizations when they achieve things at larger and larger scales. That's a good sign and not a problem.

I'd agree with this, except I would extend it further to google, apple, etc.

If you don't like the way a company is run, then don't be a customer period. There are plenty of alternatives. I do not agree that suddenly these business's that have become successful should be regulated OUTSIDE of being made to pay their fair share in taxes which i way way way too low.

[Shadowferal]

Need another Roosevelt in office.

[uuuhname]

abolish capitalism.

[Unholyground]

What can be done? We can and should celebrate organizations when they achieve things at larger and larger scales. That's a good sign and not a problem.

They cause irreparable harm to the environment and world as well as create generations of mentally damaged humans.

[PACOX]

Forcible breakup of the corporations doesn't really work. See the big telecom companies - breaking up Bell didn't do shit.

Unless you want to go the way of China, the best bet is to put in preventative measures. Measures that keep massive conglomerates from forming in the first place. Unchecked capitalism is the biggest con people have ever fallen for, it doesn't and will never serve anyone but a select few. Theres no such thing as competition in a system when a few entities can just buy out or suppress potential competition.

[Endus]

Forcible breakup of the corporations doesn't really work. See the big telecom companies - breaking up Bell didn't do shit.

Unless you want to go the way of China, the best bet is to put in preventative measures. Measures that keep massive conglomerates from forming in the first place. Unchecked capitalism is the biggest con people have ever fallen for, it doesn't and will never serve anyone but a select few. Theres no such thing as competition in a system when a few entities can just buy out or suppress potential competition.

Like I implied earlier, the issue with capitalism isn't markets, it's capitalists. Capitalism is not market economics, fundamentally, and is in fact heavily antagonistic to free market action, inherently, because capitalists are the ones with economic power and competition works against their interests. Whenever people talk about the benefits of capitalism, it's always about the free markets and the power of competition and how supply and demand work and so on, and none of that is unique to or derivative from capitalist theory. Literally not one bit of it. You can get all of that in a liberal market socialist economy. The only significant change is that you no longer have capitalists engaging in class economic warfare against the workers and consumers both, you have workers and consumers with shared-but-competing interests, which actually creates a lot of the promises capitalist theory absolutely fails to produce, like competitive markets, free labor markets, mutually-supportive growth for all parties, and so on.