![]() The number of start-up businesses has plummeted since the late 1970s. Workers have fewer bidders for their labor and cannot secure decent wages. Read: America’s monopolies are holding back the economyĪll Americans suffer from the wave of corporate consolidation that followed. The lawyers and the bankers who handled mergers and acquisitions loved it. Bork’s analysis gained enormous power in the courts and the Reagan administration. The conservative legal theorist Robert Bork-later a failed Supreme Court nominee-and his allies in the law-and-economics movement argued that any merger making businesses more efficient must be approved, and that a larger scale generally increases efficiency. Forty years ago, the government essentially stopped policing industry concentration. To focus the discussion of monopoly on the tech sector is to minimize the scope of a problem long in the making. Competition is hardly stiff when even many store brands are just renamed versions of market-leading products at Costco, the batteries come from Duracell and the coffee from Starbucks. You think you have choices in grocery aisles or at car-rental counters, but the majority of consumer products come from a handful of companies. Whether you are shopping for pacemakers, sanitary napkins, or wholesale office supplies, you will find very few sellers. And just as Amazon sometimes undercuts the smaller third-party sellers that use its platform, Big Agriculture competes directly with smaller suppliers the top four hog firms, which control around two-thirds of the market, typically own farms, slaughterhouses, warehouses, and distribution trucks, every step from the pig trough to the dinner table. This is little different from the situation of small farmers, who must raise livestock to the exacting specifications of the meatpacking giants and can lose their livelihoods on those companies’ whims. Software developers who want to sell apps to iPhone users must do so through Apple’s App Store, which spells out rules that they must follow and collects up to 30 percent of sales. Read: Family Dollar is actually worth 8.5 billion dollars ![]() Despite the pandemic, Dollar General still plans to open 1,000 new stores in 2020. Last summer in Marlinton, West Virginia, I saw a Dollar General right next door to a Family Dollar. But among the other forces squeezing out small retailers are dollar stores, a market segment dominated by two firms that together have about six times more outlets in America than Walmart. Across America, people send their kids to Starbucks parking lots to piggyback on the wifi and complete their homework.Īmazon’s rapidly expanding e-commerce empire-and the potential consequences for Main Streets and municipal tax bases across the country-is definitely worth worrying about. ![]() But millions of rural Americans cannot access the internet to begin with, in part because telecom companies harass, fight, and induce state legislatures to pass laws restricting municipal broadband. Lawmakers and the public should be concerned about the surveillance networks by which Facebook and Google-which dominate the digital-advertising market-track users, build data profiles on them, and serve them customized ads. That’s because the structure of modern capitalism favors companies that operate at once-unimaginable scale, in the absence of a government will to prevent monopolies from forming. would still have an astounding number of industries controlled by a tiny number of firms. The truth is that, even if Congress somehow decreed the breakup of all four tech giants, the U.S. The dangers of Big Tech domination are more profound now than they were even a few months ago.įranklin Foer: What Big Tech wants out of the pandemicīut the hearing may also have the unintended consequence of associating the problem of economic concentration with Big Tech alone. ![]() Shares in the Big Four, along with Microsoft, Netflix, and Tesla, added $291 billion in market value in just one day last week. These problems have only grown worse with the coronavirus pandemic, as smaller businesses succumb to the economic damage, and changing patterns in teleworking and retail accelerate in ways that make Americans more reliant on technologies produced by a few firms. Members of Congress will be able to detail how large tech platforms abuse their position to invade user privacy, muscle out or buy up competitors, and gouge suppliers and partners-behaviors that ultimately damage innovation and exacerbate inequality. Aside from possibly bringing together more wealth than ever before assembled in a congressional hearing, the event marks a triumph for a nascent movement of antitrust scholars who have revived the debate about concentrated economic power in the United States. On Wednesday, the House antitrust subcommittee will hear testimony from the CEOs of the Big Four tech firms: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |