Giant companies are the security holes of capitalism. The more centralized industries get, the more they attract socialist political activists. The Bolshevik Revolution was a violent version of this vs. railroad stations, newspapers, etc. Now activism is focused on tech giants.
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What is the barrier to entry to compete with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube... Can we really blame the state here? Isnt the network effect more significant?
It very well could be. The blame game is not nearly as important as the reality of the vast and dangerous political power now in the hands of the tech giants, and the fact that this power is attracting censorious activists and regulators whether that violates principle or not.
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Oh I totally agree. In a way, I hope this gets worse so that it weakens their own dominance. We need open platforms and a reason to switch. Also saw this as an opportunity to contest JW's point of view that monopolies can only exist with state backing.
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Publicly traded companies can buy smaller companies and instantly have the revenue of the smaller company 10x more valuable. Why? Because public companies benefit from many government favors. For more on why monopoly requires government violence see:https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 …
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Would Facebook have been orders of magnitude easier to compete with, if these favours were not offered? I am not convinced. I would argue that the network effect is the biggest factor here.
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Perhaps the network effect only secures dominance for short time spans. When one platform becomes too dominant, it self-destructs, or just becomes repugnant to the new crop of young people who do not want to share a platform with their parents :D
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Network effects & regulatory capture are both common ways to secure dominance. The most important such networks are not user networks but ad networks, since advertisers r social medias' customers (users are product). Advrtisrs r behind much of much of this censorship/"curation".
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Network effects also cut both ways. You can grow rapidly and be replaced rapidly as well. But, if like the publicly traded companies we are discussing, you have massive advantage wrt accessing capital you can buy up the next social network for more that its worth to compete w/ u.
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Book banning and Burning in the Electronic Age
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The Nazis used Brown Shirts. Street thugs, to kill and silence. When will the streets be overrun by these Authoritarians.
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Again, it’s important to utilize our antitrust laws! These tech companies have become too unwieldy. The difficulty seems to lie in the fact that each device must be able to communicate with each other. Standardization is mandatory.
@realDonaldTrump@TomFitton@FoxNewsThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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