Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
I was snarkily echoing my parent comment’s criticism (sorry!). Of course there’s lots of regulation especially once these companies grow large. My point is it’s capitalism that grew them from $0 to $3T, and it’s capitalism that’ll take them back down to $0 and recycle those assets into newer, innovative companies.
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
There's no need for me to prove that this can happen because, as I pointed out, it already has happened many times, from Xerox to HP to Dell to IBM. It's happening right now at Oracle. You can see the very earliest stages at Apple and Google.
Apple and Google control the internet, through controlling web search and browsing. One pays the other to ensure this monopoly. And none of the companies you mentioned were worth 3 trillion, and last I checked they all continue to exist and hold reasonable market share, and none of them taking market share from another is a case of a garage startup knocking off a monopolist.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
A better system would be one where you never need to rely on one of only a handful corporations to talk to your friends. The way to achieve this is regulations that require interoperability - then companies have to compete on service rather than coasting on their locked in user base.
The minimum amount needed to ensure the basic spirit of the law actually happens.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
- company started in garage
- makes first sales
- gets popular
- gets investors
- becomes huge, changing the world of computing
- enshittifies
- gets replaced by the next company that was started in a garage somewhere
A good system is not one that preserves Apple or IBM or Xerox.
A good system is one that allows these companies to come and go, because in the end we want the consumer to keep winning.
Apple enshittifying is bad for everyone in the short term, but it opens the door for whatever comes next.